St. Hilary of Poitiers is
one of the greatest, yet least studied, of the Fathers of the Western
Church. He has suffered thus, partly from a certain obscurity in
his style of writing, partly from the difficulty of the thoughts which
he attempted to convey. But there are other reasons for the
comparative neglect into which he has fallen. He learnt his
theology, as we shall see, from Eastern authorities, and was not
content to carry on and develop the traditional teaching of the West;
and the disciple of Origen, who found his natural allies in the
Cappadocian school of Basil and the Gregories11 An actual dependence on
Gregory of Nyssa has sometimes been ascribed to Hilary. But
Gregory was surely too young for this. He may himself have
borrowed from Hilary; but more probably both derived their common
element from Eastern writers like Basil of Ancyra., his
juniors though they were, was speaking to somewhat unsympathetic
ears. Again, his Latin tongue debarred him from influence in the
East, and he suffered, like all Westerns, from that deep suspicion of
Sabellianism which was rooted in the Eastern Churches. Nor are
these the only reasons for the neglect of Hilary. Of his two
chief works, the Homilies22 This is certainly the
best translation of Tractatus; the word is discussed on a later
page. on the Psalms, important
as they were in popularising the allegorical method of interpretation,
were soon outdone in favour by other commentaries; while his great
controversial work on the Trinity suffered from its very perfection for
the purpose with which it was composed. It seems, at first sight,
to be not a refutation of Arianism, or of any particular phase of
Arianism, but of one particular document, the Epistle of Arius to
Alexander, in which Arian doctrines are expressed; and that a document
which, in the constantly shifting phases of the controversy, soon fell
into an oblivion which the work of Hilary has nearly shared. It
is only incidentally constructive; its plan follows, in the central
portion, that of the production of Arius which he was controverting,
and this negative method must have lessened its popularity for purposes
of practical instruction, and in competition with such a masterpiece as
the De Trinitate of St. Augustine. And furthermore,
Hilary never does himself justice. He was a great original
thinker in the field of Christology, but he has never stated his views
systematically and completely. They have to be laboriously
reconstructed by the collection of passages scattered throughout his
works; and though he is a thinker so consistent that little or no
conjecture is needed for the piecing together of his system, yet we
cannot be surprised full justice has never been done to him. He
has been regarded chiefly as one of the sufferers from the violence of
Constantius, as the composer of a useful conspectus of arguments
against Arianism, as an unsuccessful negotiator for an understanding
between the Eastern and Western Churches; but his sufferings were as
nothing compared to those of Athanasius, while his influence in
controversy seems to have been as small as the results of his
diplomacy. It is not his practical share, in word or deed, in the
conflicts of his day that is his chief title to fame, but his
independence and depth as a Christian thinker. He has, indeed,
exerted an important influence upon the growth of doctrine, but it has
iibeen through the adoption of his
views by Augustine and Ambrose; and many who have profited by his
thoughts have never known who was their author.

Hilary of Poitiers, the most impersonal of writers, is
so silent about himself, he is so rarely mentioned by contemporary
writers—in all the voluminous works of Athanasius he is never
once named,—and the ancient historians of the Church knew so
little concerning him beyond what we, as well as they, can learn from
his writings, that nothing more than a very scanty narrative can be
constructed from these, as seen in the light of the general history of
the time and combined with the few notices of him found
elsewhere. But the account, though short, cannot be seriously
defective. Apart from one or two episodes, it is eminently the
history of a mind, and of a singularly consistent mind, whose
antecedents we can, in the main, recognise, and whose changes of
thought are few, and can be followed.

He was born, probably about the year 300
a.d.33 The latest date which I
have seen assigned for his birth is 320, by Fechtrup, in
Wetzer-Welte’s Encyclopædia. But this is surely
inconsistent with his styling Ursacius and Valens, in his first Epistle
to Constantine, ‘ignorant and unprincipled youths.’
This was written about the year 355 before Hilary knew much of the
Arian controversy or the combatants, and was ludicrously inappropriate,
for Ursacius and Valens were elderly men. He had found the words
either in some of Athanasius’ writings or in the records of the
Council of Sardica, and borrowed them without enquiry. He could
not have done so had he been only some thirty-five years of age; at
fifty-five they are natural enough., and almost
certainly, since he was afterwards its bishop, in the town, or in the
district dependent upon the town, by the name of which he is usually
styled. Other names, beside Hilarius, he must have had, but we do
not know them. The fact that he has had to be distinguished by
the name of his see, to avoid confusion with his namesake of Arles, the
contemporary of St. Augustine, shews how soon and how thoroughly
personal details concerning him were forgotten. The rank of his
parents must have been respectable at least, and perhaps high; so much
we may safely assume from the education they gave him. Birth in
the Gallic provinces during the fourth century brought with it no sense
of provincial inferiority. Society was thoroughly Roman, and
education and literature more vigorous, so far as we can judge, than in
any other part of the West. The citizen of Gaul and of Northern
Italy was, in fact, more in the centre of the world’s life than
the inhabitant of Rome. Gaul was in the West what Roman Asia was
in the East, the province of decisive importance, both for position and
for wealth. And in this prosperous and highly civilised community
the opportunities for the highest education were ample. We know,
from Ausonius and otherwise, how complete was the provision for
teaching at Bordeaux and elsewhere in Gaul. Greek was taught
habitually as well as Latin. In fact, never since the days of
Hadrian had educated society throughout the Empire been so nearly
bilingual. It was not only that the Latin-speaking West had still
to turn for its culture and its philosophy to the literature of
Greece. Since the days of Diocletian the court, or at least the
most important court, had resided as a rule in Asia, and Greek had
tended to become, equally with Latin, the language of the courtier and
the administrator. The two were of almost equal importance; if an
Oriental like Ammianus Marcellinus could write, and write well, in
Latin, we may be certain that, in return, Greek was familiar to
educated Westerns. To Hilary it was certainly familiar from his
youth; his earlier thoughts were moulded by Neoplatonism, and his later
decisively influenced by the writings of Origen44 It is impossible to
agree with Zingerle (Comment. Wölfflin. p. 218) that Hilary
was under the necessity of using a Greek and Latin Glossary. Such
a passage as Tract. in Ps. cxxxviii. 43, to which he appeals,
shows rather the extent than the smallness of Hilary’s knowledge
of Greek. What he frankly confesses, there as elsewhere, is
ignorance of Hebrew. The words of Jerome (Ep. 34, 3 f.)
about Hilary’s friend, the presbyter Heliodorus, to whom he used
to refer for explanations of Origen on the Psalms, are equally
incapable of being employed to prove Hilary’s defective
Greek. Heliodorus knew Hebrew, and Hilary for want of Hebrew
found Origen’s notes on the Hebrew text difficult to understand,
and for this reason, according to Jerome, used to consult his friend;
not because he was unfamiliar with Greek.. His
literary and technical knowledge of Latin was also complete55 His vocabulary is very
poorly treated in the dictionaries; one of the many signs of the
neglect into which he has fallen. There are at least twenty-four
words in the Tractatus super Psalmos which are omitted in the
last edition of Georges’ lexicon, and these good Latin words, not
technical terms invented for purposes of argument. Among the most
interesting is quotiensque for quotienscumque; an
unnoticed use is the frequent cum quando for
quandoquidem. Of Hilary’s other writings there is as
yet no trustworthy text; from them the list of new words could at least
be doubled.. It would iiirequire wide special study and knowledge
to fix his relation in matters of composition and rhetoric to other
writers. But one assertion, that of Jerome66Ep. 70,
5,ad Magnum., that
Hilary was a deliberate imitator of the style of Quintilian, cannot be
taken seriously. Jerome is the most reckless of writers; and it
is at least possible to be somewhat familiar with the writings of both
and yet see no resemblance, except in a certain sustained gravity,
between them. Another description by Jerome of Hilary as
‘mounted on Gallic buskin and adorned with flowers of
Greece’ is suitable enough, as to its first part, to
Hilary’s dignified rhetoric; the flowers of Greece, if they mean
embellishments inserted for their own sake, are not perceptible.
In this same passage77Ep. 58,
10,ad Paulinum. Jerome goes on to
criticise Hilary’s entanglement in long periods, which renders
him unsuitable for unlearned readers. But those laborious, yet
perfectly constructed, sentences are an essential part of his
method. Without them he could not attain the effect he desires;
they are as deliberate and, in their way, as successful as the
eccentricities of Tacitus. But when Jerome elsewhere calls Hilary
‘the Rhone of Latin eloquence88Comm. in Gall.
ii.pref.,’ he is
speaking at random. It is only rarely that he breaks through his
habitual sobriety of utterance; and his rare outbursts of devotion or
denunciation are perhaps the more effective because the reader is
unprepared to expect them. Such language as this of Jerome shews
that Hilary’s literary accomplishments were recognised, even
though it fails to describe them well. But though he had at his
command, and avowedly employed, the resources of rhetoric in order that
his words might be as worthy as he could make them of the greatness of
his theme99 Cf. Tract. in
Ps. xiii. 1, Trin. i. 38., yet some portions of the De
Trinitate, and most of the Homilies on the Psalms are written
in a singularly equable and almost conversational style, the
unobtrusive excellence of which manifests the hand of a clear thinker
and a practiced writer. He is no pedant1010 Yet he strangely
reproaches his Old Latin Bible with the use of nimis for
ualde, Tract. in Ps. cxxxviii. 38. This employment
of relative for positive terms had been common in literature for at
least a century and a half., no
laborious imitator of antiquity, distant or near; he abstains, perhaps
more completely than any other Christian writer of classical education,
from the allusions to the poets which were the usual ornament of
prose. He is an eminently businesslike writer; his pages, where
they are unadorned, express his meaning with perfect clearness; where
they are decked out with antithesis or apostrophe and other devices of
rhetoric, they would no doubt, if our training could put us in sympathy
with him, produce the effect upon us which he designed, and we must, in
justice to him, remember as we read that, in their own kind, they are
excellent, and that, whether they aid us or no in entering into his
argument, they never obscure his thought. Save in the few
passages when corruption exists in the text, it is never safe to assert
that Hillary is unintelligible. The reader or translator who
cannot follow or render the argument must rather lay the blame upon his
own imperfect knowledge of the language and thought of the fourth
century. Where he is stating or proving truth, whether
well-established or newly ascertained, he is admirably precise; and
even in his more dubious speculations he never cloaks a weak argument
in ambiguous language. A loftier genius might have given us in
language inadequate, through no fault of his own, to the attempt some
intimations of remoter truths. We must be thankful to the sober
Hilary that he, with his strong sense of the limitations of our
intellect, has provided a clear and accurate statement of the case
against Arianism, and has widened the bounds of theological knowledge
by reasonable deductions from the text of Scripture, usually convincing
and always suggestive.

ivHis training as a
writer and thinker had certainly been accomplished before his
conversion. His literary work done, like that of St. Cyprian,
within a few years of middle life, displays, with a somewhat increasing
maturity of thought, a steady uniformity of language and idiom, which
can only have been acquired in his earlier days. And this assured
possession of literary form was naturally accompanied by a
philosophical training. Of one branch of a philosophical
education, that of logic, there is almost too much evidence in his
pages. He is free from the repulsive angularity which sometimes
disfigures the pages of Novatian, a writer who had no great influence
over him; but in the De Trinitate he too often refuses to trust
his reader’s intelligence, and insists upon being logical not
only in thought but in expression. But, sound premises being
given, he may always be expected to draw the right conclusion. He
is singularly free from confusion of thought, and never advances to
results beyond what his premises warrant. It is only when a
false, though accepted, exegesis misleads him, in certain collateral
arguments which may be surrendered without loss to his main theses,
that he can be refuted; or again when, in his ventures into new fields
of thought, he is unfortunate in the selection or combination of
texts. But in these cases, as always, the logical processes are
not in fault; his deduction is clear and honest.

Philosophy in those days was regarded as
incomplete unless it included some knowledge of natural phenomena, to
be used for purposes of analogy. Origen and Athanasius display a
considerable interest in, and acquaintance with, physical and
physiological matters, and Hilary shares the taste. The
conditions of human or animal birth and life and death are often
discussed1111 E.g. Trin. v.
11, vii. 14, ix. 4.; he believes in universal remedies for
disease1212Trin. ii. 22., and knows of the employment of
anæsthetics in surgery1313Trin. x.
14. This is a very remarkable allusion. Celsus, vii.
præf., confidently assumes that all surgical operation must
be painful.. Sometimes he
wanders further afield, as, for instance, in his account of the natural
history of the fig-tree1414Comm. in Matt.
xxi. 8. and the worm1515Trin. xi. 15., and in the curious little piece of
information concerning Troglodytes and topazes, borrowed, he says, from
secular writers, and still to be read in the elder Pliny1616Tract. in Ps. cxviii.
Ain. 16; it is from Plin. N.H. 37, 32.. Even where he seems to be borrowing,
on rare occasions, from the commonplaces of Roman poetry, it is rather
with the interest of the naturalist than of the rhetorician, as when he
speaks in all seriousness of ‘Marsian enchantments and hissing
vipers lulled to sleep1717Tract. in Ps.
lvii. 3. It suggests Virgil, Ovid, Silius, and others.,’ or recalls
Lucan’s asps and basilisks of the African desert as a description
of his heretical opponents1818Trin. vii.
3.. Perhaps his
lost work, twice mentioned by Jerome1919Ep. 70, 5,
Vir. Ill. 100., against the
physician Dioscorus was a refutation of physical arguments against
Christianity.

Hilary’s speculative thought, like that of every
serious adherent of the pagan creed, had certainly been inspired by
Neoplatonism. We cannot take the account of his spiritual
progress up to the full Catholic faith, which he gives in the beginning
of the De Trinitate, and of which we find a less finished sketch
in the Homily on Psalm lxi. § 2, as literal history. It is
too symmetrical in its advance through steadily increasing light to the
perfect knowledge, too well prepared as a piece of literary
workmanship—it is indeed an admirable example of majestic prose,
a worthy preface to that great treatise—for us to accept it, as
it stands, as the record of actual experience. But we may safely
see in it the evidence that Hilary had been an earnest student of the
best thought of his day, and had found in Neoplatonism not only a
speculative training but also the desire, which was to find its
satisfaction in the Faith, for knowledge of God, and for union with
Him. It was a debt which Origen, his master, shared with him; and
it must have been because, as a Neoplatonist feeling after the truth,
he found so much of common ground in Origen, that he was able to accept
so vfully the teaching of
Alexandria. But it would be impossible to separate between the
lessons which Hilary had learnt from the pagan form of this philosophy,
and those which may have been new to him when he studied it in its
Christian presentment. Of the influence of Christian Platonism
upon him something will be said shortly. At this point we need
only mention as a noteworthy indication of the fact that Hilary was not
unmindful of the debt, that the only philosophy which he specifically
attacks is the godless system of Epicurus, which denies creation,
declares that the gods do not concern themselves with men, and deifies
water or earth or atoms2020Tract. in Ps. i. 7,
lxi. 2, lxiii. 5, &c. As usual, Hilary does not name his
opponents..

It was, then, as a man of mature age, of literary skill
and philosophical training, that Hilary approached Christianity.
He had been drawn towards the Faith by desire for a truth which he had
not found in philosophy; and his conviction that this truth was
Christianity was established by independent study of Scripture, not by
intercourse with Christian teachers; so much we may safely conclude
from the early pages of the De Trinitate. It must
remain doubtful whether the works of Origen, who influenced his thought
so profoundly, had fallen into his hands before his conversion, or
whether it was as a Christian, seeking for further light upon the
Faith, that he first studied them. For it is certainly improbable
that he would find among the Christians of his own district many who
could help him in intellectual difficulties. The educated classes
were still largely pagan, and the Christian body, which was, we may
say, unanimously and undoubtingly Catholic, held, without much mental
activity, a traditional and inherited faith. Into this body
Hilary entered by Baptism, at some unknown date. His age at the
time, his employment, whether or no he was married2121 Hilary’s legendary
daughter Abra, to whom he is said to have written a letter printed in
the editions of his works, is now generally abandoned by the best
authorities, e.g. by Fechtrup, the writer, in Wetzer-Welte’s
Encyclopædia, of the best short life of Hilary.,
whether or no he entered the ministry of the Church of Poitiers, can
never be known. It is only certain that he was strengthening his
faith by thought and study.

He had come to the Faith, St. Augustine
says2222De Doctr. Chr.
ii. 40., laden, like Cyprian, Lactantius and others,
with the gold and silver and raiment of Egypt; and he would naturally
wish to find a Christian employment for the philosophy which he brought
with him. If his horizon had been limited to his neighbours in
Gaul, he would have found little encouragement and less
assistance. The oral teaching which prevailed in the West
furnished, no doubt, safe guidance in doctrine, but could not supply
reasons for the Faith. And reasons were the one great interest of
Hilary. The whole practical side of Christianity as a system of
life is ignored, or rather taken for granted and therefore not
discussed, in his writings, which are ample enough to be a mirror of
his thought. For instance, we cannot doubt that his belief
concerning the Eucharist was that of the whole Church. Yet in the
great treatise on the Trinity, of which no small part is given to the
proof that Christ is God and Man, and that through this union must come
the union of man with God, the Eucharist as a means to such union is
only once introduced, and that in a short passage, and for the purpose
of argument2323Trin. viii.
13–17.. And
altogether it would be as impossible to reconstruct the Christian life
and thought of the day from his writings as from those of the
half-pagan Arnobius. To such a mind as this the teaching which
ordinary Christians needed and welcomed could bring no satisfaction,
and no aid towards the interpretation of Scripture. The Western
Church was, indeed, in an almost illogical position. Conviction
was in advance of argument. The loyal practice of the Faith had
led men on, as it were by intuition, to apprehend and firmly hold
truths which the more thoughtful East was doubtfully and painfully
approaching. Here, again, Hilary would be out of sympathy with
his neighbours, and we cannot wonder that in such a doctrine
vias that of the Holy Spirit he
held the conservative Eastern view. Nor were the Latin speaking
Churches well equipped with theological literature. The
two2424 This is on the
assumption, which seems probable, that Irenæus was not yet
translated from the Greek. He certainly influenced Tertullian,
and through him Hilary; and his doctrine of the recapitulation
of mankind in Christ, reappearing as it does in Hilary, though not in
Tertullian, suggests that our writer had made an independent study of
Irenæus. Even if the present wretched translation existed,
he would certainly read the Greek. great theologians who had as yet written in
their tongue, Tertullian and Novatian, with the former of whom Hilary
was familiar, were discredited by their personal history. St.
Cyprian, the one doctor whom the West already boasted, could teach
disciplined enthusiasm and Christian morality, but his scattered
statements concerning points of doctrine convey nothing more than a
general impression of piety and soundness; and even his arrangement, in
the Testimonia, of Scriptural evidences was a poor weapon
against the logical attack of Arianism. But there is little
reason to suppose that there was any general sense of the need of a
more systematic theology. Africa was paralysed, and the attention
of the Western provinces probably engrossed, by the Donatist strife,
into which questions of doctrine did not enter. The adjustment of
the relations between Church and State, the instruction and government
of the countless proselytes who flocked to the Faith while toleration
grew into imperial favour, must have needed all the attention that the
Church’s rulers could give. And these busy years had
followed upon a generation of merciless persecution, during which
change of practice or growth of thought had been impossible; and the
confessors, naturally a conservative force, were one of the dominant
powers in the church. We cannot be surprised that the scattered
notices in Hilary’s writings of points of discipline, and his
hortatory teaching, are in no respect different from what we find a
century earlier in St. Cyprian. And men who were content to leave
the superstructure as they found it were not likely to probe the
foundations. Their belief grew in definiteness as the years went
on, and faithful lives were rewarded, almost unconsciously, with a
deeper insight into truth. But meanwhile they took the Faith as
they had received it; one might say, as a matter of course. There
was little heresy within the Western Church. Arianism was never
prevalent enough to excite fear, even though repugnance were
felt. The Churches were satisfied with faith and life as they saw
it within and around them. Their religion was traditional, in no
degenerate sense.

But such a religion could not satisfy ardent and logical
minds, like those of St. Hilary and his two great successors, St.
Ambrose and St. Augustine. To such men it was a necessity of
their faith that they should know, and know in its right proportions,
the truth so far as it had been revealed, and trace the appointed
limits which human knowledge might not overpass. For their own
assurance and for effective warfare against heresy a reasoned system of
theology was necessary. Hilary, the earliest, had the greatest
difficulty. To aid him in the interpretation of Scripture he had
only one writer in his own tongue, Tertullian, whose teaching, in the
matters which interested Hilary, though orthodox, was behind the
times. His strong insistence upon the subordination of the Son to
the Father, due to the same danger which still, in the fourth century,
seemed in the East the most formidable, was not in harmony with the
prevalent thought of the West. Thus Hilary, in his search for
reasons for the Faith, was practically isolated; there was little at
home which could help him to construct his system. To an
intellect so self-reliant as his this may have been no great
trial. Scrupulous though he was in confining his speculations
within the bounds of inherited and acknowledged truth, yet in matters
still undecided he exercised a singularly free judgment, now advancing
beyond, now lingering behind, the usual belief of his
contemporaries. In following out his thoughts, loyally yet
independently, he was conscious that he was breaking what was new
ground to his older fellow-Christians, almost as much as to himself,
the convert viifrom
Paganism. And that he was aware of the novelty is evident from
the sparing use which he makes of that stock argument of the old
controversialists, the newness of heresy. He uses it, e.g., in
Trin. ii. 4, and uses it with effect; but it is far less
prominent in him than in others.

For such independence of thought he could find
precedent in Alexandrian theology, of which he was obviously a careful
student and, in his free use of his own judgment upon it, a true
disciple. When he was drawn into the Arian controversy and
studied its literature, his thoughts to some extent were modified; but
he never ceases to leave upon his reader the impression of an Oriental
isolated in the West. From the Christian Platonists of
Alexandria2525 Dr. Bigg’s Bampton
Lectures upon them are full of hints for the student of Hilary. come his most
characteristic thoughts. They have passed on, for instance, from
Philo to him the sense of the importance of the revelation contained in
the divine name He that is. His peculiar
doctrine of the impassibility of the incarnate Christ is derived, more
probably directly than indirectly, from Clement of Alexandria.
But it is to Origen that Hilary stands in the closest and most constant
relations, now as a pupil, now as a critic. In fact, as we shall
see, no small portion of the Homilies on the Psalms, towards the end of
the work, is devoted to the controverting of opinions expressed by
Origen; and by an omission which is itself a criticism he completely
ignores one of that writer’s most important contributions to
Christian thought, the mystical interpretation of the Song of
Songs. It is true that Jerome2626Vir. Ill.
100. knew of a
commentary on that Book which was doubtfully attributed to Hilary; but
if Hilary had once accepted such an exegesis he could not possibly have
failed to use it on some of the numerous occasions when it must have
suggested itself in the course of his writing, for it is not his habit
to allow a thought to drop out of his mind; his characteristic ideas
recur again and again. In some cases we can actually watch the
growth of Hilary’s mind as it emancipates itself from
Origen’s influence; as, for instance, in his psychology. He
begins (Comm. in Matt. v. 8) by holding, with Origen and
Tertullian, that the soul is corporeal; in later life he states
expressly that this is not the case2727 E.g. Tract. in
Ps. cxxix. 4 f.. Yet what
Hilary accepted from Origen is far more important than what he
rejected. His strong sense of the dignity of man, of the freedom
of the will, his philosophical belief in the inseparable connection of
name and thing, the thought of the Incarnation as primarily an
obscuring of the Divine glory2828 E.g.
Trin. ix. 6., are some of the
lessons which Origen has taught him. But, above all, it is to him
that he owes his rudimentary doctrine concerning the Holy Spirit.
Hilary says nothing inconsistent with the truth as it was soon to be
universally recognised; but his caution in declining to accept, or at
least to state, the general belief of Western Christendom that the Holy
Spirit, since Christians are baptized in His Name as well as in that of
Father and Son, is God in the same sense as They, is evidence both of
his independence of the opinion around him and of his dependence on
Origen. Of similar dependence on any other writer or school there
is no trace. He knew Tertullian well, and there is some evidence
that he knew Hippolytus and Novatian, but his thought was not moulded
by theirs; and when, in the maturity of his powers, he became a
fellow-combatant with Athanasius and the precursors of the great
Cappadocians, his borrowing is not that of a disciple but of an
equal.

There is one of St. Hilary’s writings,
evidently the earliest of those extant and probably the earliest of
all, which may be noticed here, as it gives no sign of being written by
a Bishop. It is the Commentary on St. Matthew. It
is, in the strictest sense, a commentary, and not, like the work upon
the Psalms, a series of exegetical discourses. It deals with the
text of the Gospel, as it stood in Hilary’s Latin version,
without comment or criticism upon its peculiarities, and draws out the
meaning, chiefly allegorical, not of the whole Gospel,
viiibut apparently of lections
that were read in public worship. A few pages at the beginning
and end are unfortunately lost, but they cannot have contained anything
of such importance as to alter the impression which we form of the
book. In diction and grammar it is exactly similar to
Hilary’s later writings; the fact that it is, perhaps, somewhat
more stiff in style may be due to self-consciousness of a writer
venturing for the first time upon so important a subject. The
exegesis is often the same as that of Origen, but a comparison of the
several passages in which Jerome mentions this commentary makes it
certain that it is not dependent upon him in the same way as are the
Homilies on the Psalms and Hilary’s lost work upon Job. Yet
if he is not in this work the translator, or editor, of Origen, he is
manifestly his disciple. We cannot account for the resemblance
otherwise. Hilary is independently working out Origen’s
thoughts on Origen’s lines. Origen is not named, nor any
other author, except that he excuses himself from expounding the
Lord’s Prayer on the ground that Tertullian and Cyprian had
written excellent treatises upon it2929Comm. in Matt. v.
1. It may be mentioned that the chapters of the Commentary do not
coincide with those of the Gospel.. This is a
rare exception to his habit of not naming other writers. But,
whoever the writers were from whom Hilary drew his exegesis, his
theology is his own. There is no immaturity in the thought; every
one of his characteristic ideas, as will be seen in the next chapter,
is already to be found here. But there is one interesting
landmark in the growth of the Latin theological vocabulary, very
archaic in itself and an evidence that Hilary had not yet decided upon
the terms that he would use. He twice3030Comm. in Matt.
xvi. 4, theotetam quam deitatem Latini nuncupant, xxvi. 5,
theotetam quam deitatem nuncupamus. The strange accusative
theotetam makes it the more probable that we have here a
specimen of the primitive Greek vocabulary of Latin Christendom of
which so few examples, e.g. Baptism and Eucharist, have survived.
Cyprian had probably the chief share in destroying it; but the subject
has never been examined as it deserves. speaks
of Christ’s Divinity as ‘the theotes which we
call deitas.’ In his later writings he consistently
uses divinitas, except in the few instances where he is almost
forced, to avoid intolerable monotony, to vary it with
deitas; and in his commentary he would not have used
either of these words, still less would he have used both, unless he
were feeling his way to a fixed technical term. Another witness
to the early date of the work is the absence of any clear sign that
Hilary knew of the existence of Arianism. He knows, indeed, that
there are heresies which impugn the Godhead of Christ3131 So especially xii.
18. There is similarly a possible allusion to Marcellus’
teaching in xi. 9, which, however, may equally well be a reminiscence
of some cognate earlier heresy.,
and in consequence states that doctrine with great precision, and
frequently as well as forcibly. But it has been pointed
out3232 Maffei’s
Introduction, §15. that he discusses many texts which served,
in the Arian strife, for attack or defence, without alluding to that
burning question: and this would have been impossible and,
indeed, a dereliction of duty, in Hilary’s later life. And
there is one passage3333 xxxi. 3, penes quem
erat antequam nasceretur in which he speaks
of God the Father as ‘He with (or ‘in’) Whom the Word
was before He was born.’ The Incarnation is spoken
of in words which would usually denote the eternal Generation:
and if a candid reader could not be misled, yet an opportunity is given
to the malevolent which Hilary or, indeed, any careful writer engaged
in the Arian controversy would have avoided. The Commentary,
then, is an early work, yet in no respect unworthy of its author.
But though he had developed his characteristic thoughts before he began
to write it, they are certainly less prominent here than in the
treatises which followed. It is chiefly remarkable for its
display of allegorical ingenuity. Its pages are full of fantastic
interpretations of the kind which he had so great a share in
introducing into Western Europe3434 See Ebert,
Litteratur des Mittelalters, i. 139.. He started by
it a movement which he would have been powerless to stop; that he was
not altogether satisfied with the principle of allegory is shewn by the
more modest use that he made of it when he composed, with fuller
experience, the Homilies on the Psalms. It is, perhaps, only
natural that there is little allegorism in the De
Trinitate. Such a hot-house growth could not thrive in the
keen ixair of controversy. As
for the Commentary on St. Matthew, its chief influence has been
indirect, in that St. Ambrose made large use of it in his own work upon
the same Gospel. The consideration of Hilary’s use of
Scripture and of the place which it held in his system of theology is
reserved for the next chapter, where illustrations from this Commentary
are given.

About the year 350 Hilary was consecrated Bishop
of Poitiers. So we may infer from his own words3535Syn. 91;
regeneratus pridem et in episcopatu aliquantisper manens.
The renderings ‘long ago’ and ‘for some time’
in this translation seem rather too strong.
that he had been a good while regenerate, and for some little time a
bishop, on the eve of his exile in 356 a.d. Whether, like Ambrose, he was raised directly
from lay life to the Episcopate cannot be known. It is at least
possible that this was the case. His position as a bishop was one
of great importance, and, as it must have seemed, free from special
difficulties. There was a wide difference between the Church
organisation of the Latin-speaking provinces of the Empire (with the
exception of Central and Southern Italy and of Africa, in each of which
a multitude of insignificant sees were dependent upon the autocracy of
Rome and Carthage respectively) and that of the Greek-speaking
provinces of the East. In the former there was a mere handful of
dioceses, of huge geographical extent; in the latter every town, at
least in the more civilised parts, had its bishop. The Western
bishops were inevitably isolated from one another, and could exercise
none of that constant surveillance over each other’s orthodoxy
which was, for evil as well as for good, so marked a feature of the
Church life of the East. And the very greatness of their position
gave them stability. The equipoise of power was too perfect, the
hands in which it was vested too few, the men themselves, probably, too
statesmanlike, for the Western Church to be infected with that nervous
agitation which possessed the shifting multitudes of Eastern prelates,
and made them suspicious and loquacious and disastrously eager for
compromise. It was, in fact, the custom of the West to take the
orthodoxy of its bishops for granted, and an external impulse was
necessary before they could be overthrown. The two great sees
with which Hilary was in immediate relation were those of Arles and
Milan, and both were in Arian hands. But it needed the direct
incitation of a hostile Emperor to set Saturninus against Hilary; and
it was in vain that Hilary, in the floodtide of orthodox revival in the
West, attacked Auxentius. The orthodox Emperor upheld the Arian,
who survived Hilary by eight years and died in possession of his
see. But this great and secure position of the Western bishop had
its drawbacks. Hilary was conscious of its greatness3636 E.g. Trin.
viii. 1. The bishop is a prince of the Church. and strove to be worthy of it; but it was a
greatness of responsibility to which neither he, nor any other man,
could be equal. For in his eyes the bishop was still, as he had
been in the little Churches of the past, and still might be in quiet
places of the East or South, the sole priest,
sacerdos3737Sacerdos in
Hilary, as in all writers till near the end of the fourth century,
means ‘bishop’ always., of his
flock. In his exile he reminds the Emperor that he is still
distributing the communion through his presbyters to the Church.
This survival can have had none but evil results. It put both
bishop and clergy in a false position. The latter were degraded
by the denial to them of a definite status and rights of their
own. Authority without influence and information in lieu of
knowledge was all for which the former could hope. And this lack
of any organised means of influencing a wide-spread flock—such a
diocese as that of Poitiers must have been several times as large as a
rural diocese of England—prevented its bishop from creating any
strong public opinion within it, unless he were an evangelist with the
gifts of a Martin of Tours. It was impossible for him to excite
in so unwieldy a district any popular enthusiasm or devotion to
himself. Unlike an Athanasius, he could be deported into exile at
the Emperor’s will with as little commotion as the bishop of some
petty half-Greek town in Asia Minor.

xDuring the first
years of Hilary’s episcopate there was civil turmoil in Gaul, but
the Church was at peace. While the Eastern ruler Constantius
favoured the Arians, partly misled by unprincipled advisers and partly
guided by an unwise, though honest, desire for compromise in the
interests of peace, his brother Constans, who reigned in the West,
upheld the Catholic cause, to which the immense majority of his clergy
and people was attached. He was slain in January, 350, by the
usurper Magnentius, who, with whatever motives, took the same
side. It was certainly that which would best conciliate his own
subjects; but he went further, and attempted to strengthen his
precarious throne against the impending attack of Constantius by
negotiations with the discontented Nicene Christians of the East.
He tried to win over Athanasius, who was, however, too wise to listen;
and, in any case, he gained nothing by tampering with the subjects of
Constantius. Constantius defeated Magnentius, pursued him, and
finally slew him on the 11th August, 353, and was then undisputed
master not only of the East but of the West, which he proceeded to
bring into ecclesiastical conformity, as far as he could, with his
former dominions.

The general history of Arianism and the tendencies
of Christian thought at this time have been so fully and admirably
delineated in the introduction to the translation of St. Athanasius in
this series3838 By Dr.
Robertson of King’s College, London. This, and Professor
Gwatkin’s Studies of Arianism, are the best English
accounts., that it would be
superfluous and presumptuous to go over the same ground. It must
suffice to say that Constantius was animated with a strong personal
hatred against Athanasius, and that the prelates at his court seem to
have found their chief employment in intrigues for the expulsion of
bishops, whose seats might be filled by friends of their own.
Athanasius was a formidable antagonist, from his strong position in
Alexandria, even to an Emperor; and Constantius was attempting to
weaken him by creating an impression that he was unworthy of the high
esteem in which he was held. Even in the East, as yet, the Nicene
doctrine was not avowedly rejected; still less could the doctrinal
issue be raised in Gaul, where the truths stated in the Nicene Creed
were regarded as so obvious that the Creed itself had excited little
interest or attention. Hilary at this time had never heard
it3939Syn. 91., though nearly thirty years had passed
since the Council decreed it. But there were personal charges
against Athanasius, of which he has himself given us a full and
interesting account4040 The Apologia
contra Arianos, p. 100 ff. in Dr. Robertson’s
translation., which had done him,
and were to do him, serious injury. They had been disproved
publicly and completely more than once, and with great solemnity and
apparent finality ten years before this, at Sardica in 343 a.d. But in a distant province, aided by the
application of sufficient pressure, they might serve their turn, and if
the Emperor could obtain his enemy’s condemnation, and that in a
region whose theological sympathies were notoriously on his side, a
great step would be gained towards his expulsion from Egypt. No
time was lost. In October, 353, a Council was called at Arles to
consider the charges. It suited Constantius’ purpose well
that Saturninus of Arles, bishop of the most important see in Gaul, and
the natural president, was both a courtier and an Arian. He did
his work well. The assembled bishops believed, or were induced to
profess that they believed, that the charges against Athanasius were
not made in the interests of his theological opponents, and that the
Emperor’s account of them was true. The decision,
condemning the accused, was almost unanimous. Even the
representative of Liberius of Rome consented, to be disavowed on his
return; and only one bishop, Paulinus of Treves, suffered exile for
resistance. He may have been the only advocate for Athanasius, or
Constantius may have thought that one example would suffice to terrify
the episcopate of Gaul into submission. It is impossible to say
whether Hilary was present at the Council or no. It is not
probable that he was absent: and his ignorance, even later, on
important points in the dispute shows that he may xiwell have given an honest verdict against
Athanasius. The new ruler’s word had been given that he was
guilty; nothing can yet have been known against Constantius and much
must have been hoped from him. It was only natural that he should
obtain the desired decision. Two years followed, during which the
Emperor was too busy with warfare on the frontiers of Gaul to proceed
further in the matter of Athanasius. But in the Autumn of 355 he
summoned a Council at Milan, a city whose influence over Gaul was so
great that it might almost be called the ecclesiastical capital of that
country. Here again strong pressure was used, and the verdict
given as Constantius desired. Hilary was not present at this
Council; he was by this time aware of the motives of Constantius and
the courtier bishops, and would certainly have shared in the opposition
offered, and probably in the exile inflicted upon three of the leaders
in it. These were Dionysius of Milan, who disappears from
history, his place being taken by Hilary’s future enemy,
Auxentius, and Eusebius of Vercelli and Lucifer of Cagliari, both of
whom were to make their mark in the future.

By this time Hilary had definitely taken his side,
and it will be well to consider his relation to the parties in the
controversy. And first as to Arianism. As we have seen,
Arian prelates were now in possession of the two great sees of Arles
and Milan in his own neighbourhood; and Arianisers of different shades,
or at least men tolerant of Arianism, held a clear majority of the
Eastern bishoprics, except in the wholly Catholic Egypt. But it
is certain that, in the West at any rate, the fundamental difference of
the Arian from the Catholic position was not generally
recognised. Arian practice and Arian practical teaching was
indistinguishable from Catholic; and unless ultimate principles were
questioned, Catholic clergy might work, and the multitudes of Catholic
laity might live and die, without knowing that their bishop’s
creed was different from their own. The Abbé Duchesne has
made the very probable suggestion that the stately Ambrosian ritual of
Milan was really introduced from the East by Auxentius, the Arian
intruder from Cappadocia, of whom we have spoken4141Origines du culte
chrétien, p. 88.. Arian Baptism and the Arian Eucharist
were exactly the same as the Catholic. They were not sceptical;
they accepted all current beliefs or superstitions, and had their own
confessors and workers of miracles4242 Gwatkin,
Studies of Arianism, p. 134.. The Bible
was common ground to both parties: each professed its confidence
that it had the support of Scripture. “No false system ever
struck more directly at the life of Christianity than Arianism.
Yet after all it held aloft the Lord’s example as the Son of Man,
and never wavered in its worship of Him as the Son of God4343Ib., p. 28..” And the leaders of this
school were in possession of many of the great places of the Church,
and asserted that they had the right to hold them; that if they had not
the sole right, at least they had as good a right as the Catholics, to
be bishops, and yet to teach the doctrine that Christ was a creature,
not the Son. And what made things worse was that they seemed to
be at one with the Catholics, and that it was possible, and indeed
almost inevitable, that the multitudes who did not look below the
surface should be satisfied to take them for what they seemed.
Many of the Arians no doubt honestly thought that their position was a
tenable one, and held their offices with a good conscience; but we
cannot wonder that men like Athanasius and Hilary, aware of the
sophistical nature of many of the arguments used, and knowing that
some, at least, of the leaders were unscrupulous adventurers, should
have regarded all Arianism and all Arians as deliberately
dishonest. It seemed incredible that they could be sincerely at
home in the Church, and intolerable that they should have the power of
deceiving the people and persecuting true believers. It is
against Arianism in the church that Hilary’s efforts are
directed, not against Arianism as an external heresy. He ignores
heresies outside the Church as completely as does Cyprian; they
xiiare outside, and therefore he has
nothing to do with them. But Arianism, as represented by an
Auxentius or a Saturninus, is an internum malum4444Trin. vii. 3.; and to the extirpation of this
‘inward evil’ the remaining years of his life were to be
devoted.

His own devotion, from the time of his conversion
to the Catholic Faith, which almost all around him held, was not the
less sincere because it did not find its natural expression in the
Nicene Creed. That document, which primarily concerned only
bishops, and them only when their orthodoxy was in question, was hardly
known in the West, where the bishops had as yet had little occasion for
doubting one another’s faith. Hilary had never heard
it,—he can hardly have avoided hearing of it,—till just
before his exile. In his earlier conflicts he rarely mentions it,
and when he does it is in connection with the local circumstances of
the East. In later life he, with Western Christendom at large,
recognised its value as a rallying point for the faithful; but even
then there is no attachment to the Creed for its own sake. It
might almost seem that the Creed, by his defence of which Athanasius
has earned such glory, owed its original celebrity to him rather than
he to it. His unjust persecution and heroic endurance excited
interest in the symbol of which he was the champion. If it were
otherwise, there has been a strange conspiracy of silence among Western
theologians. In their great works on the Trinity, Hilary most
rarely, and Augustine never, allude to it; the Council of Aquileia,
held in the same interests and almost at the same time as that of
Constantinople in 381, absolutely ignores it4545 There is much more
evidence to this effect in Reuter, Augustinische Studien, p. 182
f. It was probably due to jealousy between West and East; cf. the
way in which John of Jerusalem ignored the African decision in
Pelagius’ case. But the West was ignorant, as well as
jealous, of the East. Even in his last years, after his sojourn
in Asia Minor, Hilary believed that Jerusalem was, as had been
prophesied, an uninhabited ruin; Tr. in Ps. cxxiv. § 2,
cxxxi. §§ 18, 23, cxlvi. § 1..
The Creed, in the year 355, was little known in the West and unpopular
in the East. Even Athanasius kept it somewhat in the background,
from reasons of prudence, and Hilary’s sympathies, as we shall
see, were with the Eastern School which could accept the truth, though
they disliked this expression of it.

The time had now come for Hilary, holding these
views of Arianism and of the Faith, to take an active part in the
conflict. We have seen that he was not at Milan; he was therefore
not personally compromised, but the honour of the Church compelled him
to move. He exerted himself to induce the bishops of Gaul to
withdraw from communion with Saturninus, and with Ursacius and Valens,
disciples of Arius during his exile on the banks of the Danube thirty
years before, and now high in favour with Constantius, and his
ministers, we might almost say, for the ecclesiastical affairs of the
Western provinces. We do not know how many bishops were enlisted
by Hilary against Saturninus. It is probable that not many would
follow him in so bold a venture; even men of like mind with himself
might well think it unwise. It was almost a revolutionary act; an
importation of the methods of Eastern controversy into the peaceful
West, for this was not the constitutional action of a synod but the
private venture of Hilary and his allies. However righteous and
necessary, in the interests of morality and religion, their conduct may
have seemed to them, to Constantius and his advisers it must have
appeared an act of defiance to the law, both of Church and State.
And Hilary would certainly not win favour with the Emperor by his
letter of protest, the First Epistle to Constantius, written
about the end of the year 355. He adopts the usual tone of the
time, that of exaggerated laudation and even servility towards the
Emperor. Such language was, of course, in great measure
conventional; we know from Cicero’s letters how little
superlatives, whether of flattery or abuse, need mean, and language had
certainly not grown more sincere under the Empire. The letter
was, in fact, a singularly bold manifesto, and one which Hilary himself
must have foreseen was likely to bring upon him the xiiipunishment which had befallen the recusants at
Arles and Milan. He begins (§ 1) in studiously general
terms, making no mention of the provinces in which the offenses were
being committed, with a complaint of the tyrannical interference of
civil officers in religious matters. If there is to be peace
(§ 2), there must be liberty; Catholics must not be forced to
become Arians. The voice of resistance was being raised; men were
beginning to say that it was better to die than to see the faith
defiled at the bidding of an individual. Equity required that
God-fearing men should not suffer by compulsory intercourse with the
teachers of execrable blasphemy, but be allowed bishops whom they could
obey with a good conscience. Truth and falsehood, light and
darkness could not combine. He entreated the Emperor to allow the
people to choose for themselves to what teachers they would listen,
with whom they would join in the Eucharist and in prayer for him.
Next (§ 3) he denies that there is any purpose of treason, or any
discontent. The only disturbance is that caused by Arian
propagators of heresy, who are busily engaged in misleading the
ignorant. He now (§ 4) prays that the excellent bishops who
have been sent into exile may be restored; liberty and joy would be the
result. Then (§ 5) he attacks the modern and deadly Arian
pestilence. Borrowing, somewhat incautiously, the words of the
Council of Sardica, now twelve years old, he gives a list of Arian
chiefs which ends with “those two ignorant and unprincipled
youths, Ursacius and Valens.” Communion with such men as
these, even communion in ignorance, is a participation in their guilt,
a fatal sin. He proceeds, in § 6, to combine denunciation of
the atrocities committed in Egypt with a splendid plea for liberty of
conscience; it is equally vain and wicked to attempt to drive men into
Arianism, and an enforced faith is, in any case, worthless. The
Arians (§ 7) were themselves legally convicted long ago and
Athanasius acquitted; it is a perversion of justice that the condemned
should now be intriguing against one so upright and so faithful to the
truth. And lastly (§ 8) he comes to the wrong just done at
Milan, and tells the well-known story of the violence practiced upon
Eusebius of Vercelli and others in the ‘Synagogue of
malignants,’ as he calls it. Here also he takes occasion to
speak of Paulinus of Treves, exiled for his resistance at Arles two
years before, where he “had withstood the monstrous crimes of
those men.” The conclusion of the letter is unfortunately
lost, and there are one or more gaps in the body of it; these, we may
judge, would only have made it more unacceptable to Constantius.

It was, indeed, from the Emperor’s point of view,
a most provocatory Epistle. He and his advisers were convinced
that compromise was the way of peace. They had no quarrel with
the orthodoxy of the West, if only that orthodoxy would concede that
Arianisers were entitled to office in the Church, or would at least be
silent; and they were animated by a persistent hatred of
Athanasius. Moreover, the whole tendency of thought, since
Constantine began to favour the Church, had run towards glorification
of the Emperor as the vice-regent of God; and the orthodox had had
their full share in encouraging the idea. That a bishop, with no
status to justify his interference, should renounce communion with his
own superior, the Emperor’s friend, at Arles; should forbid the
officers of state to meddle in the Church’s affairs, and demand
an entirely new thing, recognition by the state as lawful members of
the Church while yet they rejected the prelates whom the state
recognised; should declare that peace was impossible because the
conflicting doctrines were as different as light and darkness, and that
the Emperor’s friends were execrable heretics; should assert,
while denying that he or his friends had any treasonable purpose, that
men were ready to die rather than submit; should denounce two Councils,
lawfully held, and demand reinstatement of those who had opposed the
decision of those Councils; should, above all, take the part of
Athanasius, now obviously doomed to another exile;—all this must
have savoured of rebellion. And rebellion was no imaginary
danger. xivWe have seen that
Magnentius had tried to enlist Athanasius on his side against the Arian
Emperor. Constantius was but a new ruler over Gaul, and had no
claim, through services rendered, to its loyalty. He might
reasonably construe Hilary’s words into a threat that the
orthodox of Gaul would, if their wishes were disregarded, support an
orthodox pretender. And there was a special reason for
suspicion. At this very time Constantius had just conferred the
government of the West upon his cousin Julian, who was installed as
Cæsar on the 6th November, 355. From the first, probably,
Constantius distrusted Julian, and Julian certainly distrusted
Constantius. Thus it might well seem that the materials were
ready for an explosion; that a disloyal Cæsar would find ready
allies in discontented Catholics.

We cannot wonder that Hilary’s letter had no
effect upon the policy of Constantius. It is somewhat surprising
that several months elapsed before he was punished. In the spring
of the year 356 Saturninus presided at a Council held at Béziers,
at which Hilary was, he tells us, compelled to attend. In what
the compulsion consisted we do not know. It may simply have been
that he was summoned to attend; a summons which he could not with
dignity refuse, knowing, as he must have done, that charges would be
brought against himself. Of the proceedings of the Synod we know
little. The complaints against Hilary concerned his conduct, not
his faith. This latter was, of course, above suspicion, and it
was not the policy of the court party to attack orthodoxy in
Gaul. He seems to have been charged with exciting popular
discontent; and this, as we have seen, was an accusation which his own
letter had rendered plausible. He tried to raise the question of
the Faith, challenging the doctrine of his opponents. But though
a large majority of a council of Gallic bishops would certainly be in
sympathy with him, he had no success. Their position was not
threatened; Hilary, like Paulinus, was accused of no doctrinal error,
and these victims of Constantius, if they had raised no questions
concerning their neighbours’ faith and made no objections to the
Emperor’s tyranny, might also have passed their days in
peace. The tone of the episcopate in Gaul was, in fact, by no
means heroic. If we may trust Sulpicius Severus4646Chron. ii.
39.,
in all these Councils the opposition was prepared to accept the
Emperor’s word about Athanasius, and excommunicate him, if the
general question of the Faith might be discussed. But the
condition was evaded, and the issue never frankly raised; and, if it
was cowardly, it was not unnatural that Hilary should have been
condemned by the Synod, and condemned almost unanimously. Only
Rodanius of Toulouse was punished with him; the sufferers would
certainly have been more numerous had there been any strenuous
remonstrance against the injustice. The Synod sent their decision
to the Cæsar Julian, their immediate ruler. Julian took no
action; he may have felt that the matter was too serious for him to
decide without reference to the Emperor, but it is more likely that he
had no wish to outrage the dominant Church feeling of Gaul and alienate
sympathies which he might need in the future. In any case he
refused to pass a sentence which he must have known would be in
accordance with the Emperor’s desire; and the vote of the Synod,
condemning Hilary, was sent to Constantius himself. He acted upon
it at once, and in the summer of the same year, 356, Hilary was exiled
to the diocese, or civil district comprising several provinces, of
Asia.

We now come to the most important period of
Hilary’s life. He was already, as we have seen, a Greek
scholar and a follower of Greek theology. He was now to come into
immediate contact with the great problems of the day in the field on
which they were being constantly debated. And he was well
prepared to take his part. He had formed his own convictions
before he was acquainted with homoousion, homoiousion or the
Nicene xvCreed4747Syn. 91.. He was therefore in full sympathy
with Athanasius on the main point. And his manner of treating the
controversy shews that the policy of Athanasius was also, in a great
measure, his. Like Athanasius, he spares Marcellus as much as
possible. We know that Athanasius till the end refused to condemn
him, though one of the most formidable weapons in the armoury of the
Anti-Nicene party was the conjunction in which they could plausibly put
their two names, as those of the most strenuous opponents of
Arianism. Similarly Hilary never names Marcellus4848 This sparing of
Marcellus, in the case of a Western like Hilary, may have been a
concession to the incapacity of the West, e.g. Julius of Rome and the
Council of Sardica, to see his error. But this is not so likely
as that it was a falling in with the general policy of Athanasius, as
was the rare mention of the homoousion; cf. Gwatkin, op.
cit. 42 n. Hilary was singularly independent of Western
opinion, and his whole aim was to win the East., as he never names Apollinaris, though he
had the keenest sense of the danger involved in either heresy, and
argues forcibly and often against both. Like Athanasius again, he
has no mercy upon Photinus the disciple, while he spares Marcellus the
master; and it is a small, though clear, sign of dependence that he
occasionally applies Athanasius’ nickname of
Ariomanitæ, or ‘Arian lunatics,’ to his
opponents. It is certain that Hilary was familiar with the
writings of Athanasius, and borrowed freely from them. But so
little has yet been done towards ascertaining the progress of Christian
thought and the extent of each writer’s contribution to it, that
it is impossible to say which arguments were already current and may
have been independently adopted by Hilary and by Athanasius, and for
which the former is indebted to the latter4949 No such
examination seems to have been made as that to which Reuter in his
admirable Augustinische Studien has subjected some of the
thoughts of St. Augustine..
Yet it is universally recognised that the debt exists; and
Hilary’s greatness as a theologian5050 Harnack,
Dogmengeschichte, ii. p. 243 n. (ed. 3). Hilary is,
‘making all allowance for dependence on Athanasius, an
independent thinker, who has, indeed, excelled the bishop of Alexandria
as a theologian.’, his
mastery of the subject, would embolden him to borrow and adapt the more
freely that he was dealing as with an equal and a fellow-combatant in
the same cause.

Athanasius and Hilary can never have met face to
face. But the eyes and the agents of Athanasius were everywhere,
and he must have known something of the exile and of the services of
Hilary, who was, of course, well acquainted with the history of
Athanasius, though, with the rest of Gaul, he may not have been
whole-hearted in his defence. And now he was the more likely to
be drawn towards him because this was the time of his approximation to
the younger generation of the Conservative School. For it is with
them that Hilary’s affinities are closest and most obvious.
The great Cappadocians were devoted Origenists—we know the
service they rendered to their master by the publication of the
Philocalia,—and there could be no stronger bond of union
between Hilary and themselves. They were the outgrowth of that
great Asiatic school to which the name of Semiarians, somewhat unkindly
given by Epiphanius, has clung, and which was steadily increasing in
influence over the thought of Asia, the dominant province, at this
time, of the whole Empire. Gregory of Nazianzus, the eldest of
the three great writers, was probably not more than twenty-five years
of age when Hilary was sent into exile, and none of them can have
seriously affected even his latest works. But they represented,
in a more perfect form, the teaching of the best men of the
Conservative School; and when we find that Hilary, who was old enough
to be the father of Basil and the two Gregories, has thoughts in common
with them which are not to be found in Athanasius, we may safely assign
this peculiar teaching to the influence upon Hilary, predisposed by his
loyalty to Origen to listen to the representatives of the Origenist
tradition, of this school of theology. We see one side of this
influence in Hilary’s understatement of the doctrine of the Holy
Ghost. The Semiarians were coming to be of one mind with the
Nicenes as to the consubstantial Deity of the Son; none of them, in all
probability, at this time would have admitted the xviconsubstantial Deity of the Spirit, and
the unity of their School was to be wrecked in future years upon this
point. The fact that Hilary could use language so reserved upon
this subject must have led them to welcome his alliance the more
heartily. Neither he nor they could foresee the future of the
doctrine, and both sides must have sincerely thought that they were at
one. And, indeed, on Hilary’s part there was a great
willingness to believe in this unity, which led him, as we shall see,
into an unfortunate attempt at ecclesiastical diplomacy. Another
evidence of contact with this Eastern School, but at its most advanced
point, is the remarkable expression, ‘Only-begotten God,’
which Hilary ‘employs with startling freedom, evidently as the
natural expression of his own inmost thought5151 Hort, Two
Dissertations, p. 27..’ Dr. Hort, whose words these are,
states that the term is used by Athanasius only twice, once in youth
and once in old age; but that, on the other hand, it is familiar to two
of the Cappadocians, Basil and Gregory of Nyssa. They must have
learned it from some Asiatic writer known to Hilary as a contemporary,
to them as successors. And when we find Hilary5252Trin. viii.
40.
rejecting the baptism of heretics, and so putting himself in opposition
to what had been the Roman view for a century and that of Gaul since
the Council of Arles in 314, and then find this opinion echoed by
Gregory of Nazianzus5353 Cf. Gwatkin,
Studies of Arianism, p. 130., we are reminded not
only of Hilary’s general independence of thought, but of the
circumstance that St. Cyprian found his stoutest ally in contesting
this same point in the Cappadocian Firmilian. A comparison of the
two sets of writings would probably lead to the discovery of more
coincidences than have yet been noticed; of the fact itself, of
‘the Semiarian influence so visible in the De
Synodis of Hilary, and even in his own later work5454Ib., p.
159. It would not be fair to judge Hilary by the de
Synodis alone. The would-be diplomatist, in his eagerness to
bring about a reconciliation, is not quite just either to the facts or
to his own feelings.,’ there can be no doubt.

With these affinities, with an adequate knowledge
of the Greek language and a strong sympathy, as well as a great
familiarity, with Greek modes of thought, Hilary found himself in the
summer of the year 356 an exile in Asia Minor. It was exile in
the most favourable circumstances. He was still bishop of
Poitiers, recognised as such by the government, which only forbade him,
for reasons of state ostensibly not connected with theology, to reside
within his diocese. He held free communication with his
fellow-bishops in Gaul, and was allowed to administer his own diocese,
so far as administration by letter was possible, without
interruption. And his diocese did not forget him. We learn
from Sulpicius Severus5555Chron. ii. 39. that he and the others
of the little band of exiles, who had suffered at Arles, and Milan, and
Béziers, were the heroes of the day in their own country.
That orthodox bishops should suffer for the Faith was a new thing in
the West; we cannot wonder that subsidies were raised for their support
and delegations sent to assure them of the sympathy of their
flocks. To a man like Hilary, of energy and ability, of
recognised episcopal rank and unimpeached orthodoxy, the position
offered not less but more opportunities of service than hitherto he had
enjoyed. For no restriction was put upon his movements, so long
as he kept within the wide bounds allotted him. He had perfect
leisure for travel or for study, the money needed for the expense of
his journeys, and something of the glory, still very real, with which
the confessor was invested. And his movements were confined to
the very region where he could learn most concerning the question of
the hour, and do most for its solution. In fact, in sending
Hilary into such an exile as this, Constantius had done too much, or
too little; he had injured, and not advanced, his own favourite cause
of unity by way of compromise. In this instance, as in those of
Arius and Athanasius and many others, exile became an efficacious means
for xviithe spreading and
strengthening of convictions. If Hilary had no great success, as
we shall see, in the Council which he attended, yet his presence,
during these critical years, in a region where men were gradually
advancing to the fuller truth cannot have been without influence upon
their spiritual growth; and his residence in Asia no doubt confirmed
and enriched his own apprehension of the Faith.

It is certain that Hilary was busily engaged in writing
his great work upon the Trinity, and that some parts of it were
actually published, during his exile. But as this work in its
final form would appear to belong to the next stage of Hilary’s
life, it will be well to postpone its consideration for the present,
and proceed at once to his share in the conciliar action of the
time. We have no information concerning his conduct before the
year 358, but it is necessary to say something about the important
events which preceded his publication of the De Synodis and his
participation in the Council of Seleucia.

It was a time when new combinations of parties
were being formed. Arianism was shewing itself openly, as it had
not dared to do since Nicæa. In 357 Hilary’s
adversaries, Ursacius and Valens, in a Synod at Sirmium, published a
creed which was Arian without concealment; it was, indeed, as serious a
blow to the Emperor’s policy of compromise as anything that
Athanasius or Hilary had ventured. But it was the work of friends
of the Emperor, and shewed that, for the moment at any rate, the Court
had been won over to the extreme party. But the forces of
Conservatism were still the strongest. Within a few months, early
in 358, the great Asiatic prelates, soon to be divided over the
question of the Godhead of the Holy Spirit but still at one, Basil of
Ancyra, Macedonius and others, met at Ancyra and repudiated Arianism
while ignoring, after their manner, the Nicene definition. Then
their delegates proceeded to the Court, now at Sirmium, and won
Constantius back to his old position. Ursacius and Valens, who
had no scruples, signed a Conservative creed, as did the weak Liberius
of Rome, anxious to escape from an exile to which he had been consigned
soon after the banishment of Hilary. It was a great triumph to
have induced so prominent a bishop to minimise—we cannot say that
he denied—his own belief and that of the Western churches.
And the Asiatic leaders were determined to have the spoils of
victory. Liberius, of course, was allowed to return home, for he
had proved compliant, and the Conservatives had no quarrel with those
who held the homoousion. But the most prominent of the
Arian leaders, those who had the courage of their conviction, to the
number, it is said, of seventy, were exiled. It is true that
Constantius was quickly persuaded by other influences to restore them;
but the theological difference was embittered by the sense of personal
injury, and further conflicts rendered inevitable between Conservatives
and Arians.

It was with this Conservative party, victorious for the
moment, that Hilary had to deal. Its leaders, and especially
Basil of Ancyra, had the ear of the Emperor, and seemed to hold the
future of the Church in their hands. Hilary was on friendly terms
with Basil, with whom, as we have seen, he had much in common, and
corresponded on his behalf with the Western Bishops. He was,
indeed, by the peculiar combination in him of the Eastern and the
Western, perhaps the only man who could have played the part he
undertook. He was thoroughly and outspokenly orthodox, yet had no
prejudice in favour of the Nicene definition. He would have been
content, like the earlier generation of Eastern bishops, with a simple
formulary; the Apostles’ Creed, the traditional standard of the
West, satisfied the exigencies even of his own precise thought.
And if a personal jealousy of Athanasius and his school on the part of
the Asiatic Conservatives was one of the chief obstacles to peace, here
again Hilary had certain advantages. We have seen that there was
no personal communication between him and Athanasius; he could ignore,
and may even have been ignorant of, the antipathy of Asia to
Alexandria. And he was no absolute follower of Athanasius’
teaching. We saw that in some important respects he was an
independent xviiithinker, and that in
others he is on common ground with the Cappadocians, the heirs of the
best thought of such men as Basil of Ancyra. Nor could he labour
under any suspicion of being involved in the heresy of Marcellus.
It was an honourable tradition of Eastern Christendom to guard against
the recrudescence of such heresy as his, which revived the fallacies of
Paul of Samosata and of Sabellius, and seemed in Asia the most
formidable of all possible errors. Marcellus had forged it as a
weapon in defence of the Nicene faith; and if his doctrine were among
the most formidable antagonists of Arianism, it may well have seemed
that there was not much to choose between the two. And while
Athanasius had never condemned Marcellus, and the West had more than
once pronounced him innocent, the general feeling of the East was
decisively against him, and deeply suspicious of any appearance of
sympathy with him. And further, by one of those complications of
personal with theological opposition which were so sadly frequent,
Basil was in possession of that very see of Ancyra from which the
heretic Marcellus had been expelled. Hilary, who was unconcerned
in all this, saw a new hope for the Church in his Asiatic friends, and
his own tendencies of thought must have been a welcome surprise to
them, accustomed as they were to suspect Sabellianism in the
West. The prospect, indeed, was at first sight a fair one.
The faith, it seemed, might be upheld by imperial support, now that it
had advocates who were not prejudiced in the Emperor’s eyes as
was Athanasius; and Athanasius himself, accredited by the testimony of
Asia, might recover his position. Yet Hilary was building on an
unsound foundation. The Semiarian party was not united.
Hilary may not have suspected, or may, in his zeal for the cause, have
concealed from himself the fact, that in the doctrine of the Holy Ghost
there lay the seeds of a strife which was soon to divide his allies as
widely as Arius was separated from Athanasius. And these allies,
as a body, were not worthy supporters of the truth. There were
many sincere men among them, but these were mixed with adventurers, who
used the conflict as a means of attaining office, with as few scruples
as any of the other prelates who hung around the court. But the
fatal obstacle to success was that the whole plan depended on the
favour of Constantius. For the moment Basil and his friends
possessed this, but their adversaries were men of greater dexterity and
fewer scruples than they. Valens and Ursacius and their like were
doing their utmost to retrieve defeat and enjoy revenge. It is
significant that Athanasius, as it seems, had no share in
Hilary’s hopes and schemes for drawing East and West
together. He had an unrivalled knowledge of the circumstances,
and an open mind, willing to see good in the Semiarians; had the plan
contained the elements of success it would have received his warm
support.

Hilary threw himself heartily into it. He
travelled, we know, extensively; so much so, that his letters from Gaul
failed to reach him in the year 358. This was a serious
matter. We have seen that the exiles from the West had derived
great support from their flocks. Hilary’s own weight as a
negotiator must have depended upon the general knowledge that he did
not stand alone, but represented the public opinion of a great
province. For this reason, as well as for his own peace of mind,
it must have been a welcome relief to him to learn, when letters came
at last, that his friends had not forgotten or deserted him; and he
seized the opportunity of reply to send to the bishops of all the
Gallic provinces and of Britain the circular letter which we call the
De Synodis, translated in this volume. The Introduction to
it, here given, makes it unnecessary to describe its contents. It
may suffice to say that it is an able and well-written attempt to
explain the Eastern position to Western theologians. He shews
that the Eastern creeds, which had been composed since the Nicene, were
susceptible of an orthodox meaning, and felicitously brings out their
merits by contrast with the unmitigated heresy of the second creed of
Sirmium, which he cites at full length. It must be admitted that
there is a certain amount of special pleading; that his eyes are
resolutely shut to any other aspect of the documents than that which he
is commending to the attention of his readers in Gaul. And he is
as boldly original in his xixrendering of history as of
doctrine. He actually describes the Council of the Dedication,
which confirmed the deposition of Athanasius and propounded a
compromising creed, definitely intended to displace the Nicene, as an
‘assembly of the saints5656Syn. 32..’ The
West, we know, cared little for Eastern disputes and formularies.
There can have been no great risk that Hilary’s praise should
revolt the minds of his friends, and as little hope that it would
excite any enthusiasm among them. This description, and a good
deal else in the De Synodis, was obviously meant to
be read in the land where it was written. When all possible
allowance is made for his sympathy with the best men among the
Asiatics, and for the hopefulness with which he might naturally regard
his allies, it is still impossible to think that he was quite sincere
in asserting that their object in compiling ambiguous creeds was the
suppression of Sabellianism and not the rejection of the
homoousion. Yet it was natural enough that he should write
as he did, for the prospect must have seemed most attractive. If
this open letter could convince the Eastern bishops that they were
regarded in the West not with suspicion, as teachers of the inferiority
of Christ, but with admiration, as steadfast upholders of His reality,
a great step was made towards union. And if Hilary could persuade
his brethren in Gaul that the imperfect terms in which the East was
accustomed to express its faith in Christ were compatible with sound
belief, an approach could be made from that side also. And in
justice to Hilary we must bear in mind that he does not fall into the
error of Liberius. It was a serious fault for a Western bishop to
abandon words which were, for him and for his Church, the recognised
expression of the truth; it was a very different matter to argue that
inadequate terms, in the mouth of those who were unhappily pledged to
the use of them, might contain the saving Faith. This latter is
the argument which Hilary uses. He urges the East to advance to
the definiteness of the Nicene confession; he urges the West to welcome
the first signs of such an advance, and meantime to recognise the truth
that was half-concealed in their ambiguous documents. The attempt
was a bold one, and met, as was inevitable, with severe criticism from
the side of uncompromising orthodoxy, which we may for the moment leave
unnoticed. What Athanasius thought of the treatise we do not
know; it would be unsafe to conjecture that his own work, which bears
the same title and was written in the following year, when the futility
of the hope which had buoyed Hilary up had been demonstrated, was a
silent criticism upon the De Synodisof the
other. It is, at least, a success in itself, and was a step
towards the ultimate victory of truth; we cannot say as much of
Hilary’s effort, admirable though its intention was, and though
it must have contributed something to the softening of
asperities. But Alexandria and Gaul were distant, and while the
one excited repugnance in the Emperor’s mind, the other had
little influence with him. The decision seemed to lie in the
hands of Basil of Ancyra and his colleagues. The men who had the
ear of Constantius, and had lately induced him to banish the Arians,
must in consistency use their influence for the restoration of exiles
who were suffering for their opposition to Arianism; and this
influence, if only the West would heartily join with them, would be
strong enough to secure even the restoration of Athanasius. Such
thoughts were certainly present in the mind of Hilary when he painted
so bright a picture of Eastern Councils, and represented Constantius as
an innocent believer, once misguided but now returned to the
Faith5757Ib. 78.. From the Semiarian leaders,
controlling the policy of Constantius, he expected peace for the
Church, restoration of the exiles, the suppression of Arianism.
And if to some extent he deceived himself, and was willing to believe
and to persuade others that men’s faith and purpose differed from
what in fact it was, we must remember that it was a time of passionate
earnestness, when cool judgment concerning friend or foe was almost
impossible for one who was involved in that great conflict concerning
the Divinity of Christ.

xxBut the times
were not ripe for an understanding between East and West, and the
Asiatics in whom Hilary had put his trust were not, and did not deserve
to be, the restorers of the Church. Their victory had been
complete, but the Emperor was inconstant and their adversaries were men
of talent, who had once guided his counsels and knew how to recover
their position. The policy of Constantius was, as we know, one of
compromise, and it might seem to him that the prevailing confusion
would cease if only a sufficiently comprehensive formula could be
devised and accepted. ‘Specious charity and colourless
indefiniteness5858 Gwatkin,
Studies of Arianism, p. 163.’ was the
policy of the new party, formed by Valens and Arians of every shade,
which won the favour of Constantius within a year of the Semiarian
victory. They had been mortified, had been forced to sign a
confession which they disbelieved, many of them had suffered a
momentary exile. Now they were to have their revenge; not only
were the terms of communion to be so lax that extreme Arianism should
be at home within the Church, but, as in a modern change of ministry,
the Semiarians were to yield their sees to their opponents. To
attain these ends a Council was necessary. The general history of
the Homoean intrigues, of their division of the forces opposed to them
by the assembling of a Western Council at Rimini, of an Eastern at
Seleucia, and their apparent triumph, gained by shameless falsehood, in
the former, would be out of place. Hilary and his Asiatic friends
were concerned only with the Council which met at Seleucia in
September, 359. The Emperor, who hoped for a final settlement,
desired that the Council should be as large as possible, and the
governors of provinces exerted themselves to collect bishops, and to
forward them to Seleucia, as was usual, at the public expense.
Among the rest, Hilary, who was, we must remember, a bishop with a
diocese of his own, and of unimpugned orthodoxy, exiled ostensibly for
a political offence, received orders to attend at the cost of the
State5959 Sulp. Sev.
Chron. ii. 42.. In the Council, which numbered some
160 bishops, his Semiarian friends were in a majority of three to one;
the uncompromising Nicenes of Egypt and the uncompromising Arians,
taken together, did not number more than a quarter of the whole.
Hilary was welcomed heartily and, as it would seem, unanimously; but he
had to disclaim, on behalf of the Church in Gaul, the Sabellianism of
which it was suspected, and with some reason after the Western welcome
of Marcellus. He stated his faith to the satisfaction of the
Council in accordance with the Nicene confession6060 Sulp. Sev. ii. 42,
iuxta ea, quæ Nicææ erant a patribus
conscripta.. We cannot doubt that he made use of its
very words, for Hilary was not the man to retreat from the position he
held, and the terms of his alliance with the school of Basil of Ancyra
required no such renunciation. The proceedings of the Council, in
which Hilary took no public part, may be omitted. The Semiarians,
strong in numbers and, as they still thought, in the Emperor’s
favour, swept everything before them. They adopted the ambiguous
creed of the Council of the Dedication,—that Council which Hilary
had lately called an ‘assembly of the Saints’—for the
Nicenes were a powerless minority; and they repeated their sentence of
excommunication upon the Arians, who were still fewer in number.
They even ventured to consecrate a successor to Eudoxius, one of the
most extreme, for the great Church of Antioch. Then the Council
elected a commission of ten of the leaders of the majority to present
to the Emperor a report of its proceedings, and dispersed. In
spite of some ominous signs of obstinacy on the part of the Arians, and
of favour towards them shown by the government officials, they seemed
to have succeeded in establishing still more firmly the results
attained at Ancyra two years before, and to have struck another and, as
they might hope, a more effectual blow at the heretics.

But when the deputation, with whom Hilary travelled,
reached Constantinople, they found that the position was entirely
different from their expectation. The intriguing party, whose aim
was to punish and displace the Semiarians, had contrived a double
treason. They misrepresented the Western Council to the Emperor
as in agreement with themselves; xxiand they sacrificed their more honest
colleagues in Arianism. They hated those who, like Basil of
Ancyra, maintained the homoiousion, the doctrine that the Son is
of like nature with the Father; the Emperor sincerely rejected the
logical Arianism which said that He is of unlike nature. They
abandoned their friends in order to induce Constantius to sacrifice his
old Semiarian advisers; and proposed with success their new Homoean
formula, that the Son is ‘like the Father in all things, as
Scripture says.’ His nature is not mentioned; the last
words were a concession to the scruples of the Emperor. We shall
see presently that this rupture with the consistent Arians is a matter
of some importance for the dating of Hilary’s De
Trinitate; for the present we must follow the fortunes of
himself and his allies. He had journeyed with them to
Constantinople. This was, apparently, a breach of the order given
him to confine himself to the diocese of Asia; but he had already been
commanded to go to Seleucia, which lay beyond those limits, and his
journey to Constantinople may have been regarded as a legitimate sequel
to his former journey. In any case he was not molested, and was
allowed to appear, with the deputation from Seleucia, at the Court of
Constantius. For the last two months of the year 359 the disputes
concerning the Faith still continued. But the Emperor was firm in
his determination to bring about a compromise which should embrace
every one who was not an extreme and conscientious Arian, and the
Homoean leaders supported him ably and unscrupulously. They
falsified the sense of the Council of Rimini and denied their own
Arianism, and Constantius backed them up by threats against the
Seleucian deputation. Hilary, of course, had no official
position, and could speak only for himself. The Western Church
seemed to have decided against its own faith, and the decision of the
East, represented by the ten delegates, was not yet declared, though it
must have been probable that they would succumb to the pressure
exercised upon them, and desert their own convictions and those of the
Council whose commission they held. In these circumstances Hilary
had the courage, which we cannot easily overestimate, to make a
personal appeal to Constantius6161 Sulpicius Severus,
Chron. ii. 45, says that he addressed at this time three
petitions to the Emperor. This is, of course, not impossible; but
it is more likely that he had in his mind the two appeals, that before
the exile and the present one, and the Invective.. It is evident
that as yet he is hopeful, or at least that he thinks it worth while to
make an attempt. He writes with the same customary humility which
we found in his former address to the Emperor. Constantius is
‘most pious,’ ‘good and religious,’ ‘most
gracious,’ and so forth. The sincerity of the appeal is
manifest; Hilary still believes, or is trying to believe, that the
Emperor, who had so lately been on the side of Basil of Ancyra and his
friends, and had at their instigation humiliated and exiled their
opponents, has not transferred his favour once more to the party of
Valens. The address is written with great dignity of style and of
matter. Hilary begins by declaring that the importance of his
theme is such that it enforces attention, however insignificant the
speaker may be; yet (§ 2) his position entitles him to
speak. He is a bishop, in communion with all the churches and
bishops of Gaul, and to that very day distributing the Eucharist by the
hands of his presbyters to his own Church. He is in exile, it is
true, but he is guiltless; falsely accused by designing men who had
gained the Emperor’s ear. He appeals to Julian’s
knowledge of his innocence; indeed, the malice of his opponents had
inflicted less of suffering upon himself than of discredit upon the
administration of Julian, under which he had been condemned. The
Emperor’s rescript sentencing Hilary to exile was public; it was
notorious that the charges upon which the sentence was based were
false. Saturninus, the active promoter, if not the instigator, of
the attack, was now in Constantinople. Hilary confidently
promises to demonstrate that the proceedings were a deception of
Constantius, and an insult to Julian; if he fails, he will no longer
petition to be allowed to return to the exercise of his office,
xxiibut will retire to pass the
rest of his days as a layman in repentance. To this end he asks
to be confronted with Saturninus (§ 3), or rather takes for
granted that Constantius will do as he wishes. He leaves the
Emperor to determine all the conditions of the debate, in which, as he
repeats, he will wring from Saturninus the confession of his
falsehood. Meanwhile he promises to be silent upon the subject
till the appointed time. Next, he turns to the great subject of
the day. The world’s danger, the guilt of silence, the
judgment of God, fill him with fear; he is constrained to speak when
his own salvation and that of the Emperor and of mankind is at stake,
and encouraged by the consciousness of multitudes who sympathise with
him. He bids the Emperor (§ 4) call back to his mind the
Faith which (so he says) Constantius is longing in vain to hear from
his bishops. Those whose duty is to proclaim the Faith of God are
employed, instead, in composing faiths of their own, and so they
revolve in an endless circle of error and of strife. The sense of
human infirmity ought to have made them content to hold the Faith in
the same form of words in which they had received it. At their
baptism they had professed and sworn their faith, In the Name of the
Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; doubt or change are
equally unlawful. Yet men were using the sacred words while they
dishonestly assigned to them another meaning, or even were daring to
depart from them. Thus to some the three sacred Names were empty
terms. Hence innovations in the statement of the Faith; the
search for novelties took the place of loyalty to ancient truth, and
the creed of the year displaced the creed of the Gospels. Every
one framed his confession according to his own desire or his own
character; while creeds were multiplying, the one Faith was
perishing. Since the Council of Nicæa (§ 5) there had
been no end to this writing of creeds. So busily were men
wrangling over words, seeking novelties, debating knotty points,
forming factions and pursuing ambitions, refusing to agree and hurling
anathemas at one another, that almost all had drifted away from
Christ. The confusion was such that none could either teach or
learn in safety. Within the last year no less than four
contradictory creeds had been promulgated. There was no single
point of the Faith which they or their fathers had held upon which
violent hands had not been laid. And the pitiful creed which for
the moment held the field was that the Son is ‘like the
Father’; whether this likeness were perfect or imperfect was left
in obscurity. The result of constant change and ceaseless dispute
was self-contradiction and mutual destruction. This search for a
faith (§ 6) involved the assumption that the true Faith was not
ready to the believer’s hand. They would have it in
writing, as though the heart were not its place. Baptism implied
the Faith and was useless without its acceptance; to teach a new Christ
after Baptism, or to alter the Faith then declared, was sin against the
Holy Ghost. The chief cause of the continuance of the present
blasphemy was the love of applause; men invented grandiloquent
paraphrases in place of the Apostles’ Creed, to delude the
vulgar, to conceal their aberrations, to effect a compromise with other
forms of error. They would do anything rather than confess that
they had been wrong. When the storm arises (§ 7) the mariner
returns to the harbour he had left; the spendthrift youth, with ruin in
prospect, to the sober habits of his father’s home. So
Christians, with shipwreck of the Faith in sight and the heavenly
patrimony almost lost, must return to the safety which lies in the
primitive, Apostolic Baptismal Creed. They must not condemn as
presumptuous or profane the Nicene confession, but eschew it as giving
occasion to attacks upon the Faith and to denials of the truth on the
ground of novelty. There is danger lest innovation creep in,
excused as improvement of this creed; and emendation is an endless
process, which leads the emenders to condemnation of each other.
Hilary now (§8) professes his sincere admiration of
Constantius’ devout purpose and earnestness in seeking the truth,
which he who denies is antichrist, and he who feigns is anathema.
He entreats the Emperor to allow him to expound the Faith, in his own
presence, before the Council which was now debating the subject at
Constantinople. xxiiiHis
exposition shall be Scriptural; he will use the words of Christ, Whose
exile and Whose bishop he is. The Emperor seeks the Faith; let
him hear it not from modern volumes, but from the books of God.
Even in the West it may be taught, whence shall come some that shall
sit at meat in the kingdom of God. This is a matter not of
philosophy, but of the teaching of the Gospel. He asks audience
rather for the Emperor’s sake and for God’s Churches than
for himself. He is sure of the faith that is in him; it is
God’s, and he will never change it. But (§ 9) the
Emperor must bear in mind that every heretic professes that his own is
the Scriptural doctrine. So say Marcellus, Photinus, and the
rest. He prays (§ 10) for the Emperor’s best
attention; his plea will be for faith and unity and eternal life.
He will speak in all reverence for Constantius’ royal position,
and for his faith, and what he says shall tend to peace between East
and West. Finally (§ 11) he gives, as an outline of the
address he proposes to deliver, the series of texts on which he will
base his argument. This is what the Holy Spirit has taught him to
believe. To this faith he will ever adhere, loyal to the Faith of
his fathers, and the creed of his Baptism, and the Gospel as he has
learnt it.

In this address, to which we cannot wonder that
Constantius made no response, there is much that is remarkable.
There is no doubt that Hilary’s exile had been a political
measure, and that the Emperor, in this as in the numerous other cases
of the same kind, had acted deliberately and with full knowledge of the
circumstances in the way that seemed to him most conducive to the
interests of permanent peace. Hilary’s assumption that
Constantius had been deceived is a legitimate allusion, which no one
could misunderstand, to a fact which could not be respectfully
stated. That he should have spoken as he did, and indeed that he
should have raised the subject at all, is a clear sign of the
uncertainty of the times. A timorous appeal for mercy would have
been useless; a bold statement of innocence, although, as things turned
out, it failed, was an effort worth making to check the Homoean
advance. Saturninus, as we saw, was one of the Court party among
the bishops, and he was an enemy of Julian, who was soon to permit his
deposition. Julian’s knowledge of Hilary can have been but
small; his exile began within a month or two of the Cæsar’s
arrival in Gaul, and Julian was not responsible for it. For good
or for evil, he had little to say in the case. But the suspicions
were already aroused which were soon to lead to Julian’s revolt,
and Constantius had begun to give the orders which would lessen
Julian’s military force, and were, as he supposed, intended to
prepare his downfall. To appeal to Julian and to attack
Saturninus was to remind Constantius very broadly that great interests
were at stake, and that a protector might be found for the creed which
he persecuted. And his double mention of the West (§§
8, 10) as able to teach the truth, and as needing to be reconciled with
the East, has a political ring. It suggests that the Western
provinces are a united force, with which the Emperor must reckon.
The fact that Constantius, though he did not grant the meeting in his
own presence with Saturninus, which Hilary had asked for, yet did grant
the substance of his prayer, allowing him to return without obstacle to
his diocese, seems to shew that the Emperor felt the need for caution
and concession in the West.

The theological part of the letter is even more
remarkable. Its doctrine is, of course, exactly that of the De
Trinitate. The summary of Scripture proofs for the
doctrine in § 11, the allusion to unlearned fishermen who have
been teachers of the Faith6262 Cf. Trin.
ii. 13 ff., and several other
passages, are either anticipations or reminiscences of that work.
But the interest of the letter lies in its bold proposal to go behind
all the modern creeds, of the confusion of which a vivid picture is
drawn, and revert to the baptismal formula. Here is a leading
combatant on the Catholic side actually proposing to withdraw the
Nicene confesxxivsion:—‘Amid these shipwrecks
of faith, when our inheritance of the heavenly patrimony is almost
squandered, our safety lies in clinging to that first and only Gospel
Faith which we confessed and apprehended at our Baptism, and in making
no change in that one form which, when we welcome it and listen to it,
brings the right faith.6363 Reading
habet for habeo, but the text is obscure. I do not mean
that we should condemn as a godless and blasphemous writing the work of
the Synod of our fathers; yet rash men make use of it as a means of
gain saying’ (§ 7). The Nicene Creed6464 It is true that the
Nicene Council is not named here, but the allusion is obvious.
The Conservatives had actually objected to the novelty of the Creed;
and the Arians had, as Hilary goes on to say, used the pretext of
novelty to destroy the Gospel. The Council of Nicæa was
thirty-five years before, and is very accurately described as a
‘Synod of our fathers.’,
Hilary goes on to say, had been the starting-point of an endless chain
of innovations and amendments, and thus had done harm instead of
good. We have seen that Hilary was not only acting with the
Semiarians, but was nearer to them in many ways than he was to
Athanasius. The future of his friends was now in doubt; not only
was their doctrine in danger, but, after the example they had
themselves set, they must have been certain that defeat meant
deposition. This was a concession which only a sense of extreme
urgency could have induced Hilary to make. Yet even now he avoids
the mistake of Liberius. He offers to sign no compromising creed;
he only proposes that all modern creeds be consigned to the same
oblivion. It was, in effect, the offer of another compromise in
lieu of the Homoean; though Hilary makes it perfectly clear what is, in
his eyes, the only sense in which this simple and primitive confession
can honestly be made, yet assuredly those whose doctrine most widely
diverged would have felt able to make it. That the proposal was
sincerely meant, and that his words, uncompromising as they are in
assertion of the truth, were not intended for a simple defiance of the
enemy, is shewn by the list of heretics whom he advances, in § 9,
in proof of his contention that all error claims to be based on
Scripture. Three of them, Montanus, Manichæus and Marcion,
were heretics in the eyes of an Arian as much as of a Catholic; the
other three, Marcellus, Photinus and Sabellius, were those with whom
the Arians were constantly taunting their adversaries. Hilary
avoids, deliberately as we may be sure, the use of any name which could
wound his opponents. But bold and eloquent and true as the appeal
of Hilary was, it was still less likely that his petition for a hearing
in Council should be granted than that he should be allowed to disprove
the accusations which had led to his exile. The Homoean leaders
had the victory in their hands, and they knew it, if Hilary and his
friends were still in the dark. They did not want conciliation,
but revenge, and this appeal was foredoomed to failure. The end
of the crisis soon came. The Semiarian leaders were deposed, not
on the charge of heresy, for that would have been inconsistent with the
Homoean position and also with their acquiescence in the Homoean
formula, but on some of those complaints concerning conduct which were
always forthcoming when they were needed. Among the victims was
not only Basil of Ancyra, Hilary’s friend, but also Macedonius of
Constantinople, who was in after days to be the chief of the party
which denied the true Godhead of the Holy Ghost. He and his
friends were probably unconscious at this time of the gulf which
divided them from such men as Hilary, who for their part were content,
in the interests of unity, with language which understated their
belief, or else had not yet a clear sense of their faith upon this
point. In any case it was well that the final victory of the true
Faith was not won at this time, and with the aid of such allies; we may
even regard it as a sign of some short-sightedness on Hilary’s
part that he had thrown himself so heartily into their cause. But
he, at any rate, was not to suffer. The two Eastern parties,
Homoean and Semiarian, which alternately ejected one another from their
sees, were very evenly balanced, and though Constantius was now on the
side of the former, his friendship was not to be xxvtrusted. The solid orthodoxy of the
West was an influence which, as Hilary had hinted, could not be
ignored; and even in the East the Nicenes were a power worth
conciliating. Hence the Homoeans gave a share of the Semiarian
spoils to them6565 Cf. Gwatkin,
Studies of Arianism, p. 182.; and it was part of
the same policy, and not, as has been quaintly suggested, because they
were afraid of his arguments, that they permitted Hilary to return to
Gaul. Reasons of state as well as of ecclesiastical interest
favoured his restoration.

In the late revolution, though the Faith had
suffered, individual Catholics had gained. But the party to which
Hilary had attached himself, and from which he had hoped so much was
crushed; and his personal advantage did not compensate, in his eyes,
for the injury to truth. He has left us a memorial of his
feelings in the Invective against Constantius, one of the
bitterest documents of a controversy in which all who engaged were too
earnest to spare their opponents. It is an admirable piece of
rhetoric suffused with passion, not the less spontaneous because its
form, according to the canons of taste of that time, is perfect.
For we must remember that the education of the day was literary, its
aim being to provide the recipient with a prompt and felicitous
expression of his thoughts, whatever they might be. The invective
was certainly written in the first place as a relief to Hilary’s
own feelings; he could not anticipate that Constantius had changed his
views for the last time; that he would soon cease to be the master of
Gaul, and would be dead within some eighteen months. But the
existence of other attacks upon Constantius, composed about this time,
makes it probable that there was some secret circulation of such
documents; and we can as little accuse the writers of cowardice, when
we consider the Emperor’s far-reaching power, as we can attribute
to them injustice towards him.

The book begins with an animated summons to
resistance:—‘The time for speech is come, the time of
silence past. Let us look for Christ’s coming, for
Antichrist is already in power. Let the shepherds cry aloud, for
the hirelings are fled. Let us lay down our lives for the sheep,
for the thieves have entered in and the ravening lion prowls
around. With such words on our lips let us go forth to martyrdom,
for the angel of Satan has transfigured himself into an angel of
light.’ After more Scriptural language of the same kind,
Hilary goes on to say (§ 2) that, though he had been fully
conscious of the extent of the danger to the Faith, he had been
strictly moderate in his conduct. After the exiling of orthodox
bishops at Arles and Milan, he and the bishops of Gaul had contented
themselves with abstaining from communion with Saturninus, Ursacius and
Valens. Other heretical bishops had been allowed a time for
repentance. And even after he had been forced to attend the Synod
of Béziers, refused a hearing for the charges of heresy which he
wished to bring, and finally exiled, he had never, in word or writing,
uttered any denunciation against his opponents, the Synagogue of Satan,
who falsely claimed to be the Church of Christ. He had not
faltered in his own belief, but had welcomed every suggestion that held
out a hope of unity; and in that hope he had even refrained from
blaming those who associated or worshipped with the
excommunicate. Setting all personal considerations on one side,
he had laboured for a restoration of the Church through a general
repentance. His reserve and consistency (§ 3) is evidence
that what he is about to say is not due to personal irritation.
He speaks in the name of Christ, and his prolonged silence makes it his
duty to speak plainly. It had been happy for him had he lived in
the days of Nero or Decius (§ 4). The Holy Spirit would have
fired him to endure as did the martyrs of Scripture; torments and death
would have been welcome. It would have been a fair fight with an
open enemy. But now (§ 5) Constantius was Antichrist, and
waged his warfare by deceit and flattery. It was scourging then,
pampering now; no longer freedom in prison, but slavery at court, and
gold as deadly as the sword had xxvibeen; martyrs no longer burnt at the
stake, but a secret lighting of the fires of hell. All that seems
good in Constantius, his confession of Christ, his efforts for unity,
his severity to heretics, his reverence for bishops, his building of
churches, is perverted to evil ends. He professes loyalty to
Christ, but his constant aim is to prevent Christ from being honoured
equally with the Father. Hence (§ 6) it is a clear duty to
speak out, as the Baptist to Herod and the Maccabees to
Antiochus. Constantius is addressed (§ 7) in the words in
which Hilary would have addressed Nero or Decius or Maximian had he
been arraigned before them, as the enemy of God and His Church, a
persecutor and a tyrant. But he has a peculiar infamy, worse than
theirs, for it is as a pretended Christian that he opposes Christ,
imprisons bishops, overawes the Church by military force, threatens and
starves one council (at Rimini) into submission, and frustrates the
purpose of another (Seleucia) by sowing dissension. To the pagan
Emperors the Church owed a great debt (§ 8); the Martyrs with whom
they had enriched her were still working daily wonders, healing the
sick, casting out evil spirits, suspending the law of
gravitation6666 ‘Bodies lifted up
without support, women hanging by the feet without their garments
falling about their face.’ The other references which the
Benedictine editor gives for this curious statement are evidently
borrowed from this of Hilary. From the time of the first
Apologists exorcism is, of course, constantly appealed to as an
evidence of the truth of Christianity, but usually, in somewhat
perfunctory language, and without the assertion that the writer has
himself seen what he records. Hilary himself does not profess to
be an eye-witness.. But
Constantius’ guilt has no mitigation. A nominal Christian,
he has brought unmixed evil upon the Church. The victims of his
perversion cannot even plead bodily suffering as an excuse for their
lapse. The devil is his father, from whom he has learnt his skill
in misleading. He says to Christ, Lord, Lord, but shall
not enter the kingdom of heaven (§ 9), for he denies the Son, and
therefore the fatherhood of God. The old persecutors were enemies
of Christ only; Constantius insults the Father also, by making Him
lie. He is a wolf in sheep’s clothing (§ 10). He
loads the Church with the gold of the state and the spoil of pagan
temples; it is the kiss with which Judas betrayed his Master. The
clergy receive immunities and remissions of taxation: it is to tempt
them to deny Christ. He will only relate such acts of
Constantius’ tyranny as affect the Church (§ 11). He
will not press, for he does not know the offence alleged, his conduct
in branding bishops on the forehead, as convicts, and setting them to
labour in the mines. But he recounts his long course of
oppression and faction at Alexandria; a warfare longer than that which
he had waged against Persia6767 This is a telling
point. Constantius had been notoriously unsuccessful in his
Persian Wars.. Elsewhere, in
the East, he had spread terror and strife, always to prevent Christ
being preached. Then he had turned to the West. The
excellent Paulinus had been driven from Treves, and cruelly treated,
banished from all Christian society6868 The text is
corrupt, but it is not probable that Hilary means that Paulinus was
first relegated to Phrygia and then to some pagan frontier district, if
such there was. It is quite in Hilary’s present vein to
assume that because the Montanists were usually called after the
province of their origin, in which they were still numerous, therefore
all Phrygians were heretics and outside the pale of Christendom.
If hordeo be read for horreo the passage is
improved. Paulinus had either to be satisfied with rations of
barley bread, the food of slaves, or else to beg from the
heretics. Such treatment is very improbable, when we remember
Hilary’s own comfort in exile. But passions were excited,
and men believed the worst of their opponents. We may compare the
falsehoods in Walker’s Sufferings of the Clergy, and in
Neal’s Puritans, which were eagerly believed in and after
our own Civil War., and forced to
consort with Montanist heretics. Again, at Milan, the soldiers
had brutally forced their way through the orthodox crowds and torn
bishops from the altar; a crime like that of the Jews who slew
Zacharias in the Temple. He had robbed Rome also of her bishop,
whose restoration was as disgraceful to the Emperor as his
banishment. At Toulouse the clergy had been shamefully
maltreated, and gross irreverence committed in the Church. These
are the deeds of Antichrist. Hitherto, Hilary has spoken of
matters of public notoriety, though not of his own observation.
Now (§ 12) he comes to the Synod of Seleucia, at which he had been
present. He found there as many blasphemers as Constantius
chose. Only the Egyptians, with the exception of George, the
intruder into the See of Athanasius, were avowedly
Homoousian. xxviiYet
of the one hundred and five bishops who professed the Homoeousian
Creed, he found ‘some piety in the words of some.’
But the Anomœans were rank blasphemers; he gives, in § 13,
words from a sermon by their leader, Eudoxius of Antioch, which were
quoted by the opposition, and received with the abhorrence they
deserved. This party found (§ 14) that no toleration was to
be expected for such doctrines, and so forged the Homoean creed, which
condemned equally the homoousion, the homoiousion and the
anomoion. Their insincerity in thus rejecting their own
belief was manifest to the Council, and one of them, who canvassed
Hilary’s support, avowed blank Arianism in the
conversation. The large Homoeousian majority (§ 15) deposed
the authors of the Homoean confession, who flew for aid to Constantius,
who received them with honour and allowed them to air their
heresy. The tables were turned; the minority, aided by the
Emperor’s threats of exile, drove the majority, in the persons of
their ten delegates, to conform to the new creed. The people were
coerced by the prefect, the bishops threatened within the palace walls;
the chief cities of the East were provided with heretical
Bishops. It was nothing less than making a present to the devil
of the whole world for which Christ died. Constantius professed
(§ 16) that his aim was to abolish unscriptural words. But
what right had he to give orders to bishops or dictate the language of
their sermons? A new disease needed new remedies; warfare was
inevitable when fresh enemies arose. And, after all, the Homoean
formula, ‘like the Father,’ was itself unscriptural.
Scripture is adduced (§ 17) by Hilary to prove that the Son is not
merely like, but equal to, the Father; and (§ 18) one in nature
with Him, having (§ 19) the form and the glory of God. This
‘likeness’ is a trap (§ 20); chaff strewn on water,
straw covering a pit, a hook hidden in the bait. The Catholic
sense is the only true sense in which the word can be used, as is shewn
more fully, by arguments to be found in the De Trinitate, in
§§ 21, 22. And now he asks Constantius (§ 23) the
plain question, what his creed is. He has made a hasty progress,
by a steep descent, to the nethermost pit of blasphemy. He began
with the Faith, which deserved the name, of Nicæa; he changed it
at Antioch. But he was a clumsy builder; the structure he raised
was always falling, and had to be constantly renewed; creed after creed
had been framed, the safeguards and anathemas of which would have been
needless had he remained steadfast to the Nicene. Hilary does not
lament the creeds which Constantius had abandoned (§ 24); they
might be harmless in themselves, but they represented no real
belief. Yet why should he reject his own creeds? There was
no such reason for his discontent with them as there had been, in his
heresy, for his rejection of the Nicene. This ceaseless variety
arose from want of faith; ‘one Faith, one Baptism,’ is the
mark of truth. The result had been to stultify the bishops.
They had been driven to condemn in succession the accurate
homoousion and the harmless homoiousion, and even the
word ousia, or substance. These were the pranks of a mere
buffoon, amusing himself at the expense of the Church, and compelling
the bishops, like dogs returning to their vomit, to accept what they
had rejected. So many had been the contradictory creeds that
every one was now, or had been in the past, a heretic confessed.
And this result had only been attained (§ 26) by violence, as for
instance in the cases of the Eastern and African bishops. The
latter had committed to writing their sentence upon Ursacius and
Valens; the Emperor had seized the document. It might go to the
flames, as would Constantius himself, but the sentence was registered
with God. Other men (§ 27) had waged war with the living,
but Constantius extended his hostility to the dead; he contradicted the
teaching of the saints, and his bishops rejected their predecessors, to
whom they owed their orders, by denying their doctrine. The three
hundred and eighteen at Nicæa were anathema to him, and his own
father who had presided there. Yet though he might scorn the
past, he could not control the future. The truth defined at
Nicæa had been solemnly committed to writing and remained, however
Constantius might condemn xxviiiit. ‘Give ear,’ Hilary
concludes, ‘to the holy meaning of the words, to the unalterable
determination of the Church, to the faith which thy father avowed, to
the sure hope in which man must put his trust, the universal conviction
of the doom of heresy; and learn therefrom that thou art the foe of
God’s religion, the enemy of the tombs of the saints6969 Hilary had previously
(§ 27) asserted that ‘the Apostle has taught us to
communicate with the tombs of the saints.’ This is an
allusion to Rom. xii. 13, with the strange reading ‘tombs’
for ‘necessities’ (μνείαις for
χρείαις), which
has, in fact, considerable authority in the mss. of the New Testament and in the Latin Christian
writers. How far this reading may have been the cause, how far
the effect, of the custom of celebrating the Eucharist at the tombs of
Martyrs, it is impossible to say. The custom was by this time
more than a century old, and one of its purposes was to maintain the
sense of unity with the saints of the past. Constantius, by
denying their doctrine, had made himself their enemy., the rebellious inheritor of thy
father’s piety.’

Here, again, there is much of interest.
Hilary’s painful feeling of isolation is manifest. He had
withdrawn from communion with Saturninus and the few Arians of Gaul,
but has to confess that his own friends were not equally
uncompromising. The Gallic bishops, with their enormous dioceses,
had probably few occasions for meeting, and prudent men could easily
avoid a conflict which the Arians, a feeble minority, would certainly
not provoke. The bishops had been courteous, or more than
courteous; and Hilary dared not protest. His whole importance as
a negotiator in the East depended on the belief that he was the
representative of a harmonious body of opinion. To advertise this
departure from his policy of warfare would have been fatal to his
influence. And if weakness, as he must have judged it, was
leading his brethren at home into a recognition of Arians, Constantius
and his Homoean counsellors had ingeniously contrived a still more
serious break in the orthodox line of battle. There was reason in
his bitter complaint of the Emperor’s generosity. He was
lavish with his money, and it was well worth a bishop’s while to
be his friend. And of this expenditure Nicenes were enjoying
their share, and that without having to surrender their personal
belief, for all that was required was that they should not be
inquisitive as to their neighbours’ heresies. But Nicene
bishops, of an accommodating character, were not only holding their
own; they were enjoying a share of the spoils of the routed
Semiarians. It was almost a stroke of genius thus to shatter
Hilary’s alliance; for it was certainly not by chance that among
the sees to which Nicenes, in full and formal communion with him, were
preferred, was Ancyra itself, from which his chosen friend Basil had
been ejected. Disgusted though Hilary must have been with such
subservience, and saddened by the downfall of his friends, it is clear
that the Emperor’s policy had some success, even with him.
His former hopes being dashed to the ground, he now turns, with an
interest he had never before shewn, to the Nicene Creed as a bulwark of
the Faith. And we can see the same feeling at work in his very
cold recognition that there was ‘some piety in the words of
some’ among his friends at Seleucia. It would be unjust to
think of Hilary as a timeserver, but we must admit that there is
something almost too businesslike in this dismission from his mind of
former hopes and friendships. He looked always to a practical
result in the establishment of truth, and a judgment so sound as his
could not fail to see that the Asiatic negotiations were a closed
chapter in his life. And his mind must have been full of the
thought that he was returning to the West, which had its own interests
and its own prejudices, and was impartially suspicious of all Eastern
theologians; whose ‘selfish coldness7070 Gwatkin, Studies
of Arianism, p. 244.’
towards the East was, indeed, ten years later still a barrier against
unity. If Hilary was to be, as he purposed, a power in the West,
he must promptly resume the Western tone; and he will have succumbed to
very natural infirmity if, in his disappointment, he was disposed to
couple together his allies who had failed with the Emperor who had
caused their failure.

The historical statements of the Invective, as has been
said, cannot always be verified. The account of the Synod of
Seleucia is, however, unjust to Constantius. It was the free
xxixexpression of the belief of Asia,
and if heretics were present by command of the Emperor, an overwhelming
majority, more or less orthodox, were present by the same
command. But the character and policy of Constantius are
delineated fairly enough. The results, disastrous both to
conscience and to peace, are not too darkly drawn, and no sarcasm could
be too severe for the absurd as well as degrading position to which he
had reduced the Church. But the invective is interesting not only
for its contents but as an illustration of its writer’s
character. Strong language meant less in Latin than in English,
but the passionate earnestness of these pages cannot be doubted.
They are not more violent than the attacks of Athanasius upon
Constantius, nor less violent than those of Lucifer; if the last author
is usually regarded as pre-eminent in abuse, he deserves his reputation
not because of the vigour of his denunciation, but because his pages
contain nothing but railing. The change is sudden, no doubt, from
respect for Constantius and hopefulness as to his conduct, but the
provocation, we must remember, had been extreme. If the faith of
the Fathers was intense and, in the best sense, childlike, there is
something childlike also in their gusts of passion, their uncontrolled
emotion in victory or defeat, the personal element which is constantly
present in their controversies. Though, henceforth,
ecclesiastical policy was to be but a secondary interest with Hilary,
and diplomacy was to give place to a more successful attempt to
influence thought, yet we can see in another sphere the same spirit of
conflict; for it is evident that his labours against heresy, beside the
more serious satisfaction of knowing that he was on the side of truth,
are lightened by the logician’s pleasure in exposing fallacy.

The deposition of the Semiarian leaders took place
very early in the year 360, and Hilary’s dismissal homewards, one
of the same series of measures, must soon have followed. If he
had formed the plan of his invective before he left Constantinople, it
is not probable that he wrote it there. It was more probably the
employment of his long homeward journey. His natural route would
be by the great Egnatian Way, which led through Thessalonica to
Durazzo, thence by sea to Brindisi, and so to Rome and the North.
It is true that the historians, or rather Rufinus, from whom the rest
appear to have borrowed all their knowledge, say that Illyricum was one
sphere of his labours for the restoration of the Faith. But a
journey by land through Illyricum, the country of Valens and Ursacius
and thoroughly indoctrinated with Arianism, would not only have been
dangerous but useless. For Hilary’s purpose was to confirm
the faithful among the bishops and to win back to orthodoxy those who
had been terrorised or deceived into error, and thus to cement a new
confederacy against the Homoeans; not to make a vain assault upon what
was, for the present, an impregnable position. And though the
Western portion of the Via Egnatia did not pass through the
existing political division called Illyricum, it did lie within the
region called in history and literature by that name. Again, the
evidence that Hilary passed through Rome is not convincing; but since
it was his best road, and he would find there the most important person
among those who had wavered in their allegiance to truth, we may safely
accept it. He made it his business, we are told7171 Rufinus, Hist.
Eccl. i. 30, 31, and, dependent on him, Socrates iii. 10 and
Sozomen v. 13.,
to exhort the Churches through which he passed to abjure heresy and
return to the true faith. But we know nothing of the places
through which he passed before reaching Rome, the see of Liberius, with
whom it was most desirable for him to be on friendly terms.
Liberius was not so black as he has sometimes been painted, but he was
not a heroic figure. His position was exactly that of many other
bishops in the Western lands. They had not denied their own
faith, but at one time or another, in most cases at Rimini, they had
admitted that there was room in the same communion for Arian bishops
and for themselves. In the case of Liberius the circumstances are
involved in some obscurity, but it is clear that he had, in order to
obtain remission of his exile, taken a position xxxwhich was practically that of the old
Council of the Dedication7272 Cf. Dr. Bright,
Waymarks, p. 217. n.. Hilary, we
remember, had called that Council a ‘Synod of the Saints,’
when speaking of it from the Eastern point of view. But he had
never stooped to such a minimising of the Faith as its words, construed
at the best, involved. Easterns, in their peculiar difficulties,
he was hopeful enough to believe, had framed its terms in a legitimate
sense; he could accept it from them, but could not use it as the
expression of his own belief. So to do would have been a
retrograde step; and this step Liberius had taken, to the scandal of
the Church. Yet he, and all whose position in any way resembled
his—all, indeed, except some few incorrigible
ringleaders—were in the Church; their deflection was, in
Hilary’s words, an ‘inward evil.’ And Hilary
was no Lucifer; his desire was to unite all who could be united in
defence of the truth. This was the plan dictated by policy as
well as by charity, and in the case of Liberius, if, as is probable,
they met, it was certainly rewarded with success. Indeed,
according to Rufinus, Hilary was successful at every stage of his
journey. Somewhere on his course he fell in with Eusebius of
Vercelli, who had been exiled at the Council of Milan, had passed his
time in the region to the East of that in which Hilary had been
interned, and was now profiting by the same Homoean amnesty to return
to his diocese. He also had been using the opportunities of
travel for the promotion of the Faith. He had come from Antioch,
and therefore had probably landed at or near Naples. He was now
travelling northwards, exhorting as he went. His encounter with
Hilary stimulated him to still greater efforts; but Rufinus tells
us7373Hist. Eccl. i.
30, 31. that he was the less successful of the
two, for Hilary, ‘a man by nature mild and winning, and also
learned and singularly apt at persuasion, applied himself to the task
with a greater diligence and skill.’ They do not appear to
have travelled in company; the cities to be visited were too numerous
and their own time, eager as they must have been to reach their homes,
too short. But their journey seems to have been a triumphal
progress; the bishops were induced to renounce their compromise with
error, and the people inflamed against heresy, so that, in the words of
Rufinus7474Op. cit. i.
31. The recantation of Liberius and of the Italian bishops may be
read in Hilary’s 12th Fragment., ‘these two men, glorious luminaries
as it were of the universe, flooded Illyricum and Italy and the Gallic
provinces with their splendour, so that even from hidden nooks and
corners all darkness of heresy was banished.’

In the passage just quoted Rufinus directly
connects the publication of Hilary’s masterpiece, usually called
the De Trinitate, with this work of reconciliation. After
speaking of his success in it, he proceeds, ‘Moreover he
published his books Concerning the Faith, composed in a lofty
style, wherein he displayed the guile of the heretics and the
deceptions practiced upon our friends, together with the credulous and
misplaced sincerity of the latter, with such skill that his ample
instructions amended the errors not only of those whom he encountered,
but also of those whom distance hindered him from meeting face to
face.’ Some of the twelve books of which the work is
composed had certainly been published during his exile, and it is
possible that certain portions may date from his later residence in
Gaul. But a study of the work itself leads to the conclusion that
Rufinus was right in the main in placing it at this stage of
Hilary’s life; this was certainly the earliest date at which it
can have been widely influential.

The title which Hilary gave to his work as a whole
was certainly De Fide, Concerning the Faith, the name by which,
as we saw, Rufinus describes it. It is probable that its
controversial purpose was indicated by the addition of contra
Arianos; but it is certain that its present title, De
Trinitate, was not given to it by Hilary. The word
Trinitas is of extraordinarily rare occurrence in his writings;
the only instances seem to be in Trin. i. 22, 36, where he is
giving a very condensed summary of the contents of his work. In
the actual course of his argument the word is scrupulously avoided, as
it is in all his other writings. In xxxithis respect he resembles Athanasius, who
will usually name the Three Persons rather than employ this convenient
and even then familiar term. There may have been some undesirable
connotation in it which he desired to avoid, though this is hardly
probable; it is more likely that both Athanasius and Hilary, conscious
that the use of technical terms of theology was in their times a
playing with edged tools, deliberately avoided a word which was
unnecessary, though it might be useful. And in Hilary’s
case there is the additional reason that to his mind the antithesis of
truth and falsehood was One God or Two Gods7575 E.g. Trin.
i. 17.; that
to him, more than to any other Western theologian, the developed and
clearly expressed thought of Three coequal Persons was strange.
Since, then, the word and the thought were rarely present in his mind,
we cannot accept as the title of his work what is, after all, only a
mediæval description.

The composite character of the treatise, which
must still for convenience be called the De Trinitate, is
manifest. The beginnings of several of its books, which contain
far more preliminary, and often rhetorical, matter than is necessary to
link them on to their predecessors, point to a separate publication of
each; a course which was, indeed, necessary under the literary
conditions of the time. This piecemeal publication is further
proved by the elaborate summaries of the contents of previous books
which are given as, e.g., at the beginning of Trin. x.; and by
the frequent repetition of earlier arguments at a later stage, which
shews that the writer could not trust to the reader’s possession
of the whole. Though no such attention has been devoted to the
growth of this work as Noeldechen has paid to that of the treatises of
Tertullian, yet some account of the process can be given. For
although Hilary himself, in arranging the complete treatise, has done
much to make it run smoothly and consecutively, and though the scribes
who have copied it have probably made it appear still more homogeneous,
yet some clues to its construction are left. The first is his
description of the first book as the second (v. 3). This implies
that the fourth is the first; and when we examine the fourth we find
that, if we leave out of consideration a little preliminary matter, it
is the beginning of a refutation of Arianism. It states the Arian
case, explains the necessity of the term homoousios, gives a
list of the texts on which the Arians relied, and sets out at length
one of their statements of doctrine, the Epistle of Arius to Alexander,
which it proceeds to demolish, in the remainder of the fourth book and
in the fifth, by arguments from particular passages and from the
general sense of the Old Testament. In the sixth book, for the
reason already given, the Arian Creed is repeated, after a vivid
account of the evils of the time, and the refutation continued by
arguments from the New Testament. In § 2 of this book there
is further evidence of the composite character of the treatise.
Hilary says that though in the first book he has already set out
the Arian manifesto, yet he thinks good, as he is still dealing with
it, to repeat it in this sixth. Hilary seems to have
overlooked the discrepancy, which some officious scribe has half
corrected7676 Similarly in iv. 2 he
alludes to the first book, meaning that which we call first, though, as
we saw, in v. 3 he speaks of our fifth as his second.. The seventh book, he says at the
beginning, is the climax of the whole work. If we take the De
Trinitate as a whole, this is a meaningless flourish; but if we
look on to the eighth book, and find an elaborate introduction followed
by a line of argument different from that of the four preceding books,
we must be inclined to think that the seventh is the climax and
termination of what has been an independent work, consisting of four
books. And if we turn to the end of the seventh, and note that it
alone of all the twelve has nothing that can be called a peroration,
but ends in an absolutely bald and businesslike manner, we are almost
forced to conclude that this is because the peroration which it once
had, as the climax of the work, was unsuitable for its new position and
has been wholly removed. Had Hilary written this book as one of
the series of twelve, he would certainly, according to all rules of
literary xxxiipropriety,
have given it a formal termination. In these four books then, the
fourth to the seventh, we may see the nucleus of the De
Trinitate; not necessarily the part first written, for he says (iv.
1)7777 i.e. in the passage
introduced as a connecting link with the books which now precede it,
when the whole work was put into its present shape. that some parts, at any rate, of the three
first books are of earlier date, but that around which the whole has
been arranged. It has a complete unity of its own, following step
by step the Arian Creed, of which we shall presently speak. It is
purely controversial, and quite possibly the title Contra
Arianos, for which there is some evidence, really belongs to this
smaller work, though it clung, not unnaturally, to the whole for which
Hilary devised the more appropriate De Fide. Concerning
the date of these four books, we can only say that they must have been
composed during his exile. For though he does not mention his
exile, yet he is already a bishop (vi. 2), and knows about the
homoousion (iv. 4). We have seen already that his
acquaintance with the Nicene Creed began only just before his exile; he
must, therefore, have written them during his enforced leisure in
Asia.

In the beginning of the fourth book Hilary refers
back to the proof furnished in the previous books, written some time
ago, of the Scriptural character of his faith and of the unscriptural
nature of all the heresies. Setting aside the first book, which
does not correspond to this description, we find what he describes in
the second and third. These form a short connected treatise,
complete in itself. It is much more academic than that of which
we have already spoken; it deals briefly with all the current heresies
(ii. 4 ff.), but shews no sign that one of them, more than the others,
was an urgent danger. There is none of the passion of conflict;
Hilary is in the mood for rhetoric, and makes the most of his
opportunities. He expatiates, for instance, on the greatness of
his theme (ii. 5), harps almost to excess upon the fisherman to whom
mysteries so great were revealed (ii. 13 ff.), dilates, after the
manner of a sermon, upon the condescension and the glory manifested in
the Incarnation, describes miracles with much liveliness of detail
(iii. 5, 20), and ends the treatise (iii. 24–26) with a nobly
eloquent statement of the paradox of wisdom which is folly and folly
which is wisdom, and of faith as the only means of knowing God.
The little work, though it deals professedly with certain heresies, is
in the main constructive. It contains far more of positive
assertion of the truth, without reference to opponents, than it does of
criticism of their views. In sustained calmness of tone—it
recognises the existence of honest doubt (iii. 1),—and in
literary workmanship, it excels any other part of the De
Trinitate and in the latter respect is certainly superior to the
more conversational Homilies on the Psalms. But it
suffers, in comparison with the books which follow, by a certain want
of intensity; the reader feels that it was written, in one sense, for
the sake of writing it, and written, in another sense, for purposes of
general utility. It is not, as later portions of the work were,
forged as a weapon for use in a conflict of life and death. Yet,
standing as it does, at the beginning of the whole great treatise, it
serves admirably as an introduction. It is clear, convincing and
interesting, and its eloquent peroration carries the reader on to the
central portion of the work, which begins with the fourth book.
Except that the second book has lost its exordium, for the same reason
that the seventh has lost its conclusion, the two books are complete as
well as homogeneous. Of the date nothing definite can be
said. There is no sign of any special interest in Arianism; and
Hilary’s leisure for a paper conflict with a dead foe like
Ebionism suggests that he was writing before the strife had reached
Gaul. The general tone of the two books is quite consistent with
this; and we may regard it as more probable than not that they were
composed before the exile; whether they were published at the time as a
separate treatise, or laid on one side for a while, cannot be known;
the former supposition is the more reasonable.

The remaining books, from the eighth to the twelfth,
appear to have been written xxxiiicontinuously, with a view to their
forming part of the present connected whole. They were, no doubt,
published separately, and they, with books iv. to vii., may well be the
letters (stripped, of course, in their permanent shape of their
epistolary accessories) which, Hilary feared, were obtaining no
recognition from his friends in Gaul. The last five have certain
references back to arguments in previous books7878 E.g. ix. 31 to iii.
12, ix. 43 to vii. 17.,
while these do not refer forward, nor do the groups ii. iii. and
iv.–vii. refer to one another. But books viii.–xii.
have also internal references, and promise that a subject shall be
fully treated in due course7979 E.g. x. 54
in.. We may
therefore assume that, when he began to write book viii., Hilary had
already determined to make use of his previous minor works, and that he
now proceeded to complete his task with constant reference to
these. Evidences of exact date are here again lacking; he writes
as a bishop and as an exile8080 viii. 1, x. 4., and under a most
pressing necessity. The preface to book viii., with its
description of the dangers of the time and of Hilary’s sense of
the duty of a bishop, seems to represent the state of mind in which he
resolved to construct the present De Trinitate. It is too
emphatic for a mere transition from one step in a continuous discussion
to another. Regarding these last five books, then, as written
continuously, with one purpose and with one theological outlook, we may
fix an approximate date for them by two considerations. They
shew, in books ix. and x., that he was thoroughly conscious of the
increasing peril of Apollinarianism. They shew also, by their
silence, that he had determined to ignore what was one of the most
obvious and certainly the most offensive of the current modes of
thought. There is no refutation, except implicitly, and no
mention of Anomœanism, that extreme Arianism which pronounced the
Son unlike the Father8181 This heresy is not even
mentioned in xii. 6, where the opening was obvious.. This can be
explained only in one way. We have seen that Hilary thinks
Arianism worth attack because it is an ’inward evil;’ that
he does not, except in early and leisurely work such as book ii., pay
any attention to heresies which were obviously outside the Church and
had an organization of their own. We have seen also that the
Homoeans cast out their more holiest Anomœan brethren in
359. The latter made no attempt to retrieve their position within
the church; they proceeded to establish a Church of their own, which
was, so they protested, the true one. It was under Jovian
(a.d. 362–363) that they consecrated
their own bishop for Constantinople8282 Dr. Gwatkin,
Studies of Arianism, p. 226.; but the
separation must have been visible for some time before that decisive
step was taken. Thus, when the De Trinitate took its
present form, Apollinarianism was risen above the Church’s
horizon and Anomœanism was sunk below it. We cannot,
therefore, put the completion of the work earlier shall the remission
of Hilary’s exile; we cannot, indeed, suppose that he had leisure
to make it perfect except in his home. Yet the work must have
been for the most part finished before its writer reached Italy on his
return; and the issue or reissue of its several portions was a natural,
and certainly a powerful, measure towards the end which he had at
heart.

There remains the first book, which was obviously, as
Erasmus saw, the last to be composed. It is a survey of the
accomplished task, beginning with that account of Hilary’s
spiritual birth and growth which has already been mentioned. This
is a piece of writing which it is no undue praise to rank, for dignity
and felicity of language, among the noblest examples of Roman
eloquence. Hooker, among English authors, is the one whom it most
suggests. Then there follows a brief summary of the argument of
the successive books, and a prayer for the success of the work.
This reads, and perhaps it was meant to read, as though it were a
prayer that he might worthily execute a plan which as yet existed only
in his brain; but it may also be interpreted, in the more natural
sense, as a petition that his hope might not be frustrated, and that
his book might appear to others what he trusted, xxxivin his own mind, that it was, true to
Scripture, sound in logic, and written with that lofty gravity which
befitted the greatness of his theme.

After speaking of the construction of the work, as
Hilary framed it, something must be said of certain interpolations
which it has suffered. The most important are those at the end of
book ix. and in x. 8, which flatly contradict his teaching8383 Cf.
Gore’s Dissertations, p. 134.. They are obvious intrusions,
imperfectly attested by manuscript authority, and condemned by their
own character. Hilary was not the writer to stultify himself and
confuse his readers by so clumsy a device as that of appending a bald
denial of its truth to a long and careful exposition of his
characteristic doctrine. Another passage, where the scholarship
seems to indicate the work of an inferior hand, is Trin. x. 40,
in which there is a singular misunderstanding of the Greek
Testament8484 St. Luke xxii. 32, where ἐδεήθην is translated
as a passive. Christ is entreated for Peter. There
seems to be no parallel in Latin theology.. The writer must have known Greek,
for no manuscript of the Latin Bible would have suggested his mistake,
and therefore he must have written in early days. It is even
possible that Hilary himself was, for once, at fault in his
scholarship. Yet, at the most, the interpolations are few and,
where they seriously affect the sense, are easily detected8585 E.g. the cento
from the De Trinitate attached to the Invective against
Constantius.. Not many authors of antiquity have
escaped so lightly in this respect as Hilary.

Hilary certainly intended his work to be regarded
as a whole; as a treatise Concerning the Faith, for it had grown
into something more than a refutation of Arianism. He has
carefully avoided, so far as the circumstances of the time and the
composite character of the treatise would allow him, any allusion to
names and events of temporary interest; there is, in fact, nothing more
definite than a repetition of the wish expressed in the Second Epistle
to Constantius, that it were possible to recur to the Baptismal formula
as the authoritative statement of the Faith8686 ii. I.. It is not, like the
De Synodis; written with a diplomatic purpose; it is, though
cast inevitably in a controversial form, a statement of permanent
truths. This has involved the sacrifice of much that would have
been of immediate service, and deprived the book of a great part of its
value as a weapon in the conflicts of the day. But we can see, by
the selection he made of a document to controvert, that Hilary’s
choice was deliberate. It was no recent creed, no confession to
which any existing body of partisans was pledged. He chose for
refutation the Epistle of Arius to Alexander, written almost forty
years ago and destitute, it must have seemed, of any but an historical
interest. And it was no extreme statement of the Arian
position. This Epistle was ‘far more temperate and
cautious8787 Newman,
Arians of the Fourth Century, ii. v. 2.’ than its alternative, Arius’
letter to Eusebius. The same wide outlook as is manifest in this
indifference to the interests of the moment is seen also in
Hilary’s silence in regard to the names of friends and
foes. Marcellus, Apollinaris, Eudoxius, Acacius are a few of
those whom it must have seemed that he would do well to renounce as
imagined friends who brought his cause discredit, or bitter enemies to
truth and its advocates. But here also he refrains; no names are
mentioned except those of men whose heresies were already the
commonplaces of controversy. And there is also an absolute
silence concerning the feuds and alliances of the day. No notice
is taken of the loyalty of living confessors or the approximation to
truth of well-meaning waverers. The book contains no sign that it
has any but a general object; it is, as far as possible, an impersonal
refutation of error and statement of truth.

This was the deliberate purpose of Hilary, and he had
certainly counted its cost in immediate popularity and success.
For though, as we have seen, the work did produce, as it deserved, a
considerable effect at the time of its publication, it has remained
ever since, in spite of all its merits, in a certain obscurity.
There can be no doubt that this is largely due to the Mezentian union
with such a document as Arius’ Epistle xxxvto Alexander of the decisively important
section of the De Trinitate. The books in which that
Epistle is controverted were those of vital interest for the age; and
the method which Hilary’s plan constrained him to adopt was such
as to invite younger theologians to compete with him. Future
generations could not be satisfied with his presentation of the
case. And again, his plan of refuting the Arian document point by
point8888 v. 6., contrasting as it does with the free
course of his thought in the earlier and later books, tends to repel
the reader. The fourth book proves from certain texts that the
Son is God; the fifth from the same texts that He is true God.
Hence this part of the treatise is pervaded by a certain monotony; a
cumulative impression is produced by our being led forward again and
again along successive lines of argument to the same point, beyond
which we make no progress till the last proof is stated. The work
is admirably and convincingly done, but we are glad to hear the last of
the Epistle of Arius to Alexander, and accompany Hilary in a less
embarrassed enquiry.

Yet the whole work has defects of its own.
It is burdened with much repetition; subjects, especially, which have
been treated in books ii. and iii. are discussed again at great length
in later books8989 E.g. bk. iii. is
largely reproduced in ix.; ii. 9 f. = xi. 46 f.. The frequent
stress laid upon the infinity of God, the limitations of human speech
and knowledge, the consequent incompleteness of the argument from
analogy, the humility necessary when dealing with infinities apparently
opposed9090 E.g. i. 19, ii. 2, iii. 1,
iv. 2, viii. 53, xi. 46 f., though it adds to the solemnity of the
writer’s tone and was doubtless necessary when the work was
published in parts, becomes somewhat tedious in the course of a
continuous reading. And something must here be said of the
peculiarities of style. We saw that in places, as for instance in
the beginning of the De Trinitate, Hilary can rise to a
singularly lofty eloquence. This eloquence is not merely the
unstudied utterance of an earnest faith, but the expression given to it
by one whom natural talent and careful training had made a master of
literary form. Yet, since his training was that of an age whose
standard of taste was far from classical purity, much that must have
seemed to him and to his contemporaries to be admirably effective can
excite no admiration now. He prays, at the end of the first book,
that his diction may be worthy of his theme, and doubtless his effort
was as sincere as his prayer. Had there been less effort, there
would certainly, in the judgment of a modern reader, have been more
success. But he could not foresee the future, and ingenious
affectations such as occur at the end of book viii. § 1,
impietati insolenti, et insolentiæ vaniloquæ, et
vaniloquio seducenti, with the jingle of rhymes which follows, are
too frequent for our taste in his pages9191 Cf. v. 1 (beginning of
column 130 in Migne), x. 4.. Sometimes we find purple
patches which remind us of the rhetoric of Apuleius9292 E.g. v. 3
fin.;
sometimes an excessive display of symmetry and antithesis, which
suggests to us St. Cyprian at his worst. Yet Cyprian had the
excuse that all his writings are short occasional papers written for
immediate effect; neither he, nor any Latin Christian before Hilary,
had ventured to construct a great treatise of theology, intended to
influence future ages as well as the present. Another excessive
development of rhetoric is the abuse of apostrophe, which Hilary
sometimes rides almost to death, as in his addresses to the Fisherman,
St. John, in the second book9393 Cf. Ad
Const. ii. 8, in writing which his own words in the De
Trinitate must have come into his mind. He had probably
borrowed the thought from Origen, contra Celsum, i. 62.
Similar apostrophes are in v. 19, vi. 19 f., 33.. These
blemishes, however, do not seriously affect his intelligibility.
He has earned, in this as in greater matters, an unhappy reputation for
obscurity, which he has, to a certain extent, deserved. His other
writings, even the Commentary on St. Matthew, are free from the
involved language which sometimes makes the De Trinitate hard to
understand, and often hard to read with pleasure. When Hilary was
appealing to the Emperor, or addressing his own flock, as in the
Homilies on the Psalms, he has command of a style which is
always clear, stately on occasion, never weak or xxxvibald; in these cases he resisted, or did
not feel, the temptation to use the resources of his rhetoric.
These, unfortunately, had for their result the production of sentences
which are often marvels of grammatical contortion and elliptical
ingenuity. Yet such sentences, though numerous, are of few and
uniform types. In Hilary’s case, as in that of Tertullian,
familiarity makes the reader so accustomed to them that he
instinctively expects their recurrence; and, at their worst, they are
never actual breaches of the laws of the language. A translator
can hardly be an impartial judge in this matter, for constantly, in
passages where the sense is perfectly clear, the ingenuity with which
words and constructions are arranged makes it almost impossible to
render their meaning in idiomatic terms. One can translate him
out of Latin, but not into English. In this he resembles one of
the many styles of St. Augustine. There are passages in the De
Trinitate, for instance viii. 27, 28, which it would seem that
Augustine had deliberately imitated; a course natural enough in the
case of one who was deeply indebted to his predecessor’s thought,
and must have looked with reverence upon the great pioneer of
systematic theology in the Latin tongue. But this involution of
style, irritating as it sometimes is, has the compensating advantage
that it keeps the reader constantly on the alert. He cannot skim
these pages in the comfortable delusion that he is following the course
of thought without an effort.

The same attention which Hilary demands from his
readers has obviously been bestowed upon the work by himself. It
is the selected and compressed result not only of his general study of
theology, but of his familiarity with the literature and the many
phases of the great Arian controversy9494 Cf. x. 57
in.. And he
makes it clear that he is engaged in no mere conflict of wit; his
passionate loyalty to the person of Christ is the obvious motive of his
writing. He has taken his side with full conviction, and he is
equally convinced that his opponents have irrevocably taken
theirs. There is little or no reference to the existence or even
the possibility of doubt, no charitable construction for ambiguous
creeds, hardly a word of pleading with those in error9595 All instance is xi.
24 in.. There is no excuse for heresy; it is
mere insanity, when it is not wilful self-destruction or deliberate
blasphemy. The battle is one without quarter; and sometimes, we
must suspect, Hilary has been misled in argument by the uncompromising
character of the conflict. Every reason advanced for a pernicious
belief, he seems to think, must itself be bad, and be met with a direct
negative. And again, in the heat of warfare he is led to press
his arguments too far. Not only is the best and fullest use of
Scripture made—for Hilary, like Athanasius, is marvellously
imbued with its spirit as well as familiar with its letter—but
texts are pressed into his service, and interpreted sometimes with
brilliant ingenuity9696 E.g. in his masterly
treatment, from his point of view, of the Old Testament Theophanies,
iv. 15 f., which cannot bear
the meaning assigned them. Yet much of this exegesis must be laid
to the charge of his time, not of himself; and in the De
Trinitate, as contrasted with the Homilies on the Psalms; he
is wisely sparing in the use of allegorical interpretations. He
remembers that he is refuting enemies, not conversing with
friends. And his belief in their conscious insincerity leads to a
certain hardness of tone. They will escape his conclusions if
they possibly can; he must pin them down. Hence texts are
sometimes treated, and deductions drawn from them, as though they were
postulates of geometry; and, however we may admire the machine-like
precision and completeness of the proof, we feel that we are reading
Euclid rather than literature9797 Cf. viii. 26 f., ix.
41.. But this also
is due to that system of exegesis, fatal to any recognition of the
eloquence and poetry of Scripture, of which something will be said in
the next chapter.

These, after all, are but petty flaws in so great a
work. Not only as a thinker, but as a pioneer of thought, whose
treasures have enriched, often unrecognised, the pages xxxviiof Ambrose and Augustine and all later
theologians, he deserves our reverence. Not without reason was he
ranked, within a generation of his death, with Cyprian and Ambrose, as
one of the three chief glories of Western Christendom9898 Orosius,
Apol. 1.. Jerome and Augustine mention him
frequently and with honour. This is not the place to summarise or
discuss the contents of his works; but the reader cannot fail to
recognise their great and varied value, the completeness of his
refutation of current heresies, the convincing character of his
presentation of the truth, and the originality, restrained always by
scrupulous reverence as well as by intellectual caution, of his
additions to the speculative development of the Faith. We
recognise also the tenacity with which, encumbered as he was with the
double task of simultaneously refuting Arianism and working out his own
thoughts, he has adhered to the main issues. He never wanders
into details, but keeps steadfastly to his course. He refrains,
for instance, from all consideration of the results which Arianism
might produce upon the superstructure of the Faith and upon the conduct
of Christians; they are undermining the foundations, and he never
forgets that it is these which he has undertaken to strengthen and
defend. Our confidence in him as a guide is increased by the
eminently businesslike use which he makes of his higher
qualities. This is obvious in the smallest details, as, for
instance, in his judicious abstinence, which will be considered in the
next chapter, from the use of technical terms of theology, when their
employment would have made his task easier, and might even, to
superficial minds, have enhanced his reputation. We see it also
in the talent which he shews in the device of watchwords, which serve
both to enliven his pages and to guide the reader through their
argument. Such is the frequent antithesis of the orthodox
unitas with the heretical unio, the latter a harmless
word in itself and used by Tertullian indifferently with the former,
but seized by the quick intelligence of Hilary to serve this special
end9999 E.g. iv. 42,
fin.; such also, the frequent ‘Not two Gods
but One100100 E.g. i. 17.,’ and the more obvious contrast between
the Catholic unum and the Arian unus. Thus, in
excellence of literary workmanship, in sustained cogency and steady
progress of argument, in the full use made of rare gifts of intellect
and heart, we must recognise that Hilary has brought his great
undertaking to a successful issue; that the voyage beset with many
perils, to use his favourite illustration, has safely ended in the
haven of Truth and Faith.

Whether the De Trinitate were complete or
not at the time of his return to Poitiers, after the triumphal passage
through Italy, its publication in its final form must very shortly have
followed. But literature was, for the present, to claim only the
smaller share of his attention. Heartily as he must have rejoiced
to be again in his home, he had many anxieties to face. The
bishops of Gaul, as we saw from the Invective against Constantius, had
been less militant against their Arian neighbours than he had
wished. There had been peace in the Church; such peace as could
be produced by a mutual ignoring of differences. And it may well
be that the Gallican bishops, in their prejudice against the East,
thought that Hilary himself had gone too far in the path of
conciliation, and that his alliance with the Semiarians was a much
longer step towards compromise with heresy than their own prudent
neutrality. Each side must have felt that there was something to
be explained. Hilary, for his part, by the publication of the
De Trinitate had made it perfectly clear that his faith was
above suspicion; and his abstinence in that work from all mention of
existing parties or phases of the controversy shewed that he had
withdrawn from his earlier position. He was now once more a
Western bishop, concerned only with absolute truth and the interests of
the Church in his own province. But he had to reckon with the
sterner champions of the Nicene faith, who xxxviiihad not forgotten the De Synodis,
however much they might approve the De Trinitate. Some
curious fragments survive of the Apology which he was driven to write
by the attacks of Lucifer of Cagliari. Lucifer, one of the exiles
of Milan, was an uncompromising partisan, who could recognise no
distinctions among those who did not accept the Nicene Creed. All
were equally bad in his eyes; no explaining away of differences or
attempt at conciliation was lawful. In days to come he was to be
a thorn in the side of Athanasius, and was to end his life in a schism
which he formed because the Catholic Church was not sufficiently
exclusive. We, who know his after history and turn with
repugnance from the monotonous railing with which his writings, happily
brief, are filled, may be disposed to underestimate the man. But
at the time he was a formidable antagonist. He had the great
advantage of being one of the little company of confessors of the
Faith, whom all the West admired. He represented truly enough the
feeling of the Latin Churches, now that the oppression of their leaders
had awakened their hostility to Arianism. And vigorous abuse,
such as the facile pen of Lucifer could pour forth, is always
interesting when addressed to prominent living men, stale though it
becomes when the passions of the moment are no longer felt.
Lucifer’s protest is lost, but we may gather from the fragments
of Hilary’s reply that it was milder in tone than was usual with
him. Indeed, confessor writing to confessor would naturally use
the language of courtesy. But it was an arraignment of the policy
which Hilary had adopted, and in which he had failed, though Athanasius
was soon to resume it with better success. And courteously as it
may have been worded, it cannot have been pleasant for Hilary to be
publicly reminded of his failure, and to have doubts cast upon his
consistency; least of all when he was returning to Gaul with new hopes,
but also with new difficulties. His reply, so far as we can judge
of it from the fragments which remain, was of a tone which would be
counted moderate in the controversies of to-day. He addresses his
opponent as ‘Brother Lucifer,’ and patiently explains that
he has been misunderstood. There is no confession that he had
been in the wrong, though he fully admits that the term
homoiousion, innocently used by his Eastern friends, was
employed by others in a heretical sense. And he points out that
Lucifer himself had spoken of the ‘likeness’ of Son and
Father, probably alluding to a passage in his existing
writings101101 Cf. Krüger,
Lucifer Bischof von Calaris, p. 39.. The use of this
tu quoque argument, and a certain apologetic strain which is
apparent in the reply, seem to shew that Hilary felt himself at a
disadvantage. He must have wished the Asiatic episode to be
forgotten; he had now to make his weight felt in the West, where he had
good hope that a direct and uncompromising attack upon Arianism would
be successful.

For a great change was taking place in public
affairs. When Hilary left Constantinople, early in the spring of
the year 360, it was probably a profound secret in the capital that a
rupture between Constantius and Julian was becoming inevitable.
In affairs, civil and ecclesiastical, the Emperor and his favourite,
the bishop Saturnine, must have seemed secure of their dominance in
Gaul. But events moved rapidly. Constantius needed troops
to strengthen the Eastern armies, never adequate to an emergency, for
an impending war with Persia; he may also have desired to weaken the
forces of Julian. He demanded men; those whom Julian detached for
Eastern service refused to march, and proclaim Julian Emperor at
Paris. This was in May, some months, at the least, before Hilary,
delayed by his Italian labours in the cause of orthodoxy, can have
reached home. Julian temporised; he kept up negotiations with
Constantius, and employed his army in frontier warfare. But there
could be no doubt of the issue. Conflict was inevitable, and the
West could have little fear as to the result. The Western armies
were the strongest in the Empire; it was with them that, in the last
great trial of strength, xxxixConstantine the Great had won the day, and the
victory of his nephew, successful and popular both as a commander and
an administrator, must have been anticipated. Julian’s
march against Constantius did not commence till the summer of the year
361; but long before this the rule of Constantius and the theological
system for which he stood had been rejected by Gaul. The bishops
had not shunned Saturninus, as Hilary had desired; most of them had
been induced to give their sanction to Arianism at the Council of
Rimini. While overshadowed by Constantius and his representative
Saturninus, they had not dared to assert themselves. But now the
moment was come, and with it the leader. Hilary’s arrival
in Gaul must have taken place when the conflict was visibly impending,
and he can have had no hesitation as to the side he should take.
Julian’s rule in Gaul began but a few months before his exile,
and they had probably never met face to face. But Julian had a
well earned reputation as a righteous governor, and Hilary had
introduced his name into his second appeal to Constantius, as a witness
to his character and as suffering in fame by the injustice of
Constantius. We must remember that Julian had kept his paganism
carefully concealed, and that all the world, except a few intimate
friends, took it for granted that he was, as the high standard of his
life seemed to indicate, a sincere Christian. And now he had
displaced Constantius in the supreme rule over Gaul, and Saturninus,
who had by this time returned, was powerless. We cannot wonder
that Hilary continued his efforts; that he went through the land,
everywhere inducing the bishops to abjure their own confession made at
Rimini. This the bishops, for their part, were certainly willing
to do; they were no Arians at heart, and their treatment at Rimini,
followed as it was by a fraudulent misrepresentation of the meaning of
their words, must have aroused their just resentment. Under the
rule of Julian there was no risk, there was even an advantage, in
shewing their colours; it set them right both with the new Emperor and
with public opinion. But it was not enough for Hilary’s
purpose that the ‘inward evil’ of a wavering faith should
be amended; it was also necessary that avowed heresy should be
expelled. For this the co-operation of Julian was necessary; and
before it was granted Julian might naturally look for some definite
pronouncement on Hilary’s part. To this conjuncture, in the
latter half of the year 360 or the earlier part of 361, we may best
assign the publication of the Invective, already described, against
Constantius. It was a renunciation of allegiance to his old
master, not the less clear because the new is not mentioned. And
with the name of Constantius was coupled that of Saturninus, as his
abettor in tyranny and misbelief. Julian recognised the value of
the Catholic alliance by giving effect to the decision of a Council
held at Paris, which deposed Saturninus. Hilary had no
ecclesiastical authority to gather such a Council, but his character
and the eminence of his services no doubt rendered his colleagues
willing to follow him; yet neither he nor they would have acted as they
did without the assurance of Julian’s support. Their action
committed them irrevocably to Julian’s cause; and it must have
seemed that his expulsion of Saturninus committed him irrevocably to
the orthodox side. Yet Julian impartially disbelieving both
creeds, had made the ostensible cause of Saturninus’ exile not
his errors of faith, but some of those charges of misconduct which were
always forthcoming when a convenient excuse was wanted for the
banishment of a bishop. Saturninus was a man of the world, and
very possibly his Arianism was only assumed in aid of his ambition; it
is likely enough that his conduct furnished sufficient grounds for his
punishment. The fall of its chief, Sulpicius Severus says,
destroyed the party. The other Arian prelates, who must have been
few in number, submitted to the orthodox tests, with one
exception. Paternus of Périgord, a man of no fame, had the
courage of his convictions. He stubbornly asserted his belief,
and shared the fate of Saturninus. Thus Hilary obtained, what he
had failed to get in the case of the more prominent offender, a clear
precedent for the deposition of bishops guilty of Arianism.
xlThe synodical letter,
addressed to the Eastern bishops in reply to letters which some of them
had sent to Hilary since his return, was incorporated by him in his
History, to be mentioned hereafter102102 Fragment xi.. The
bishops of Gaul assert their orthodoxy, hold Auxentius, Valens,
Ursacius and their like excommunicate, and have just excommunicated
Saturninus. By his action at Paris, so Sulpicius says, Hilary
earned the glory that it was by his single exertions that the provinces
of Gaul were cleansed from the defilements of heresy103103Chron. ii.
45..

These events happened before Julian left the country, in
the middle of the summer of 361, on his march against Constantius; or
at least, if the actual proceedings were subsequent to his departure,
they must have quickly followed it, for his sanction was necessary, and
when that was obtained there was no motive for delay. And now,
for some years, Hilary disappears from sight. He tells us nothing
in his writings of the ordinary course of his life and work; even his
informal and discursive Homilies cast no light upon his methods of
administration, his successes or failures, and very little on the
character of his flock. There was no further conflict within the
Church of Gaul during Hilary’s lifetime. The death of
Constantius, which happened before Julian could meet him in battle,
removed all political anxiety. Julian himself was too busy with
the revival of paganism in the East to concern himself seriously with
its promotion in the Latin-speaking provinces, from which he was
absent, and for which he cared less. The orthodox cause in Gaul
did not suffer by his apostasy. His short reign was followed by
the still briefer rule of the Catholic Jovian. Next came
Valentinian, personally orthodox, but steadily refusing to allow
depositions on account of doctrine. Under him Arianism dwindled
away; Catholic successors were elected to Arian prelates, and the
process would have been hastened but by a few years had Hilary been
permitted to expel Auxentius from Milan, as we shall presently see him
attempting to do.

This was his last interference in the politics of
the Church, and does not concern us as yet. His chief interest
henceforth was to be in literary work; in popularising and, as he
thought, improving upon the teaching of Origen. He commented upon
the book of Job, as we know from Jerome and Augustine. The former
says that this, and his work on the Psalms, were translations from
Origen. But that is far from an accurate account of the latter
work, and may be equally inaccurate concerning the former. The
two fragments which St. Augustine has preserved from the Commentary on
Job are so short that we cannot draw from them any conclusion as to the
character of the book. If we may trust Jerome, its length was
somewhat more than a quarter of that of the Homilies on thePsalms104104 Jerome, Apol.
adv. Rufinum, i. 2, says that the total length of the Commentaries
on Job and the Psalms was about 40,000 lines, i.e. Virgilian
hexameters. The latter, at a tough estimate, must be nearly
35,000 lines in its present state. But Jerome, as we shall see,
was not acquainted with so many Homilies as have come down to us; we
must deduct about 5,000 lines, and this will leave l0,000 for the
Commentary on Job, making it two sevenths of the length of the
other. Jerome, however, is not careful in his statements of
lengths; he calls the short De Synodis ‘a very long
book,’ Ep. v. 2., in their present
form. It is unfortunate, but not surprising, that the work should
have fallen into oblivion. It was, no doubt, allegorical in its
method, and nothing of that kind could survive in competition with
Gregory the Great’s inimitable Moralia on Job.

Hilary’s other adaptation from Origen, the
Homilies on the Psalms, happily remains to us. It is at
least as great a work as the De Trinitate, and one from which we
can learn even more what manner of man its writer was. For the
De Trinitate is an appeal to all thoughtful Christians of the
time, and written for future generations as well as for them;
characteristic, as it is, in many ways of the author, the compass of
the work and the stateliness of its rhetoric tend to conceal his
personality. But the Homilies105105Tractatusought to be translated thus. It is the
term, and the only term, used so early as this for the bishop’s
address to the congregation; in fact, one might almost say that
tractare, tractatus in Christian language had no other
meaning. It is an anachronism in the fourth century to render
prædicare by ‘preach;’ cf. Duchesne, Liber
Pontificalis, i. 126.on
the Psalms, which would seem to have xlireached us in the notes of a shorthand
writer, so artless and conversational is the style, shew us Hilary in
another aspect. He is imparting instruction to his own familiar
congregation; and he knows his people so well that he pours out
whatever is passing through his mind. In fact, he seems often to
be thinking aloud on subjects which interest him rather than addressing
himself to the needs of his audience. Practical exhortation has,
indeed, a much smaller space than mystical exegesis and speculative
Christology. Yet abstruse questions are never made more obscure
by involution of style. The language is free and flowing, always
that of an educated man who has learnt facility by practice. And
here, strange as it seems to a reader of the De Trinitate, he
betrays a preference for poetical words106106 E.g.
fundamen, Tr. in Ps. cxxviii. 10, germen, cxxxiv.
1, revolubilis, ii. 23, peccamen, ii. 9 fin. and
often. The shape of sentences, though simple, is always good; to
take one test word, sæpe, which was almost if not quite
extinct in common use, occurs fairly often near the end of a period,
where it was needed for rhythm, which frequenter would have
spoiled. Some Psalms, e.g. xiii., xiv., are treated more
rhetorically than others.,
which shews that his renunciation of such ornament elsewhere is
deliberate. Yet, even here, he indulges in no definite
reminiscences of the poets.

There remains only one trace, though it is
sufficient, of the original circumstances of delivery. The Homily
on Psalm xiv. begins with the words, ‘The Psalm which has been
read.’ The Psalms were sung as an act of worship, not read
as a lesson, in the normal course of divine service; and therefore we
must assume that the Psalm to be expounded was recited, by the rector
or another, as an introduction to the Homily. We need not be
surprised that such notices, which must have seemed to possess no
permanent interest, have been edited away. Many of the Homilies
are too long to have been delivered on one or even two occasions, yet
the ascription of praise with which Hilary, like Origen, always
concludes,107107Psalm li. is the only
exception, due, no doubt, to careless transcription. The Homilies
on the titles of Psalms ix. and xci. do not count; they are probably
spurious, and in any case are incomplete, as the text of the Psalms is
not discussed. has been omitted in
every case except at the end of the whole discourse. This shews
that Hilary himself, or more probably some editor, has put the work
into its final shape. But this editing of the Homilies has not
extended to the excision of the numerous repetitions, which were
natural enough when Hilary was delivering each as a commentary complete
in itself, and do not offend us when we read the discourse on a single
Psalm, though they certainly disfigure the work when regarded as a
treatise on the whole Psalter.

It is probably due to the accidents of time that
our present copies of the Homilies are imperfect. We are, indeed,
better off than was Jerome. His manuscript contained Homilies on
Psalms 1, 2, 51–62, 118–150, according to the Latin
notation. We have, in addition to these, Homilies which are
certainly genuine on Psalms 13, 14, 63–69; and others on the
titles of Psalms 9 and 91, which are probably spurious108108 So Zingerle, Preface,
p. xiv, to whom we owe the excellent Vienna Edition of the Homilies,
the only part of Hilary’s writing which has as yet appeared in a
critical text. The writer of the former of these two Homilies, in
§ 2, says that the title of a Psalm always corresponds to the
contents. This is quite contrary to Hilary’s teaching, who
frequently points out and ingeniously explains what seem to him, to be
discrepancies.. Some more Homilies of uncertain
origin which have been fathered upon Hilary, and may be found in the
editions, may be left out of account. In the Homily on Psalm 59,
§ 2, he mentions one, unknown to Jerome as to ourselves, on Psalm
44; and this allusion, isolated though it is, suggests that the
Homilies contained, or were meant to contain, a commentary on the whole
Book of Psalms, composed in the order in which they stand. There
is, of course, nothing strange in the circulation in ancient times of
imperfect copies; a well-known instance is that of St.
Augustine’s copy of Cyprian which did not contain an epistle
which has come down to us. This series of Homilies was probably
continuous as well as complete. The incidental allusions to the
events of the times contain nothing inconsistent with the supposition
that he began at the beginning of the Psalter and went on to the
end. We might, indeed, construe the language of that on Psalm 52,
§ 13, concerning prosperous clergy, who heap up wealth for
themselves and live in luxury, as an allusion to men like Saturninus,
but the passage is vague, and a vivid recollection, xliinot a present evil, may have suggested
it. More definite, and indeed a clear note of time, is the Homily
on Psalm 63, where heathenism is aggressive and is become a real
danger, of which Hilary speaks in the same terms as he does of
heresy. This contrasts strongly with such language as that of the
Homily on Psalm 67, § 20, where the heathen are daily flocking
into the Church, or of that on Psalm 137, § 10, where paganism has
collapsed, its temples are ruined and its oracles silent; such words as
the former could only have been written in the short reign of
Julian. Other indications, such as the frequent warnings against
heresy and denunciations of heretics, are too general to help in fixing
the date. On the whole, it would seem a reasonable hypothesis
that Hilary began his connected series of Homilies on the Psalms
soon after his return to Gaul, that he had made good progress with them
when Julian publicly apostatised, and that they were not completed till
the better times of Valentinian.

He was conversing in pastoral intimacy with his
people, and hence we cannot be surprised that he draws, perhaps
unconsciously, on the results of his own previous labours. For
instance, on Psalm 61, § 2, he gives what is evidently a
reminiscence, yet with features of its own and not as a professed
autobiography, of his mental history as described in the opening of the
De Trinitate. And while the direct controversy against
Arianism is not avoided, there is a manifest preference for the
development of Hilary’s characteristic Christology, which had
already occupied him in the later books of the De
Trinitate. We must, indeed, reconstruct his doctrine in this
respect even more from the Homilies than from the De Trinitate;
and in the later work he not only expands what he had previously
suggested, but throws out still further suggestions which he had not
the length of life to present in a more perfect form. But the
Homilies contain much that is of far less permanent interest.
Wherever he can109109 E.g. in the
Instruction or discourse preparatory to the Homilies, and in the
introductory sections of that on Ps. 118 (119)., he brings in the
mystical interpretation of numbers, that strange vagary of the Eastern
mind which had, at least from the time of Irenæus and the Epistle
of Barnabas, found a congenial home in Christian thought. This
and other distortions of the sense of Scripture, which are the result
in Hilary, as in Origen, of a prosaic rather than a poetical turn of
mind, will find a more appropriate place for discussion at the
beginning of the next chapter. Allusions to the mode of worship
of his time are very rare110110 E.g. Instr. in
Ps., § 12, the fifty days of rejoicing during which Christians
must not prostrate themselves in prayer, nor fast., as are details of
contemporary life. Of general encouragement to virtue and
denunciation of vice there is abundance, and it repeats with striking
fidelity the teaching of Cyprian. Hilary displays the same
Puritanism in regard to jewelry as does Cyprian111111Ps. 118,
Ain., § 16., and
the same abhorrence of public games and spectacles. Of these
three elements, the Christology, the mysticism, the moral teaching, the
Homilies are mainly compact. They carry on no sustained argument
and contain, as has been said, a good deal of repetition. In
fact, a continuous reader will probably form a worse impression of
their quality than he who is satisfied with a few pages at a
time. They are eminently adapted for selection, and the three
Homilies, those on Psalms 1, 53 and 130, which have been translated for
this volume, may be inadequate, yet are fairly representative, as
specimens of the instruction which Hilary conveys in this
work.

It has been said that the practical teaching of
Hilary is that of Cyprian. But this is not a literary
debt112112 The account of
exorcism given on Ps. 64, § 10, suggests Cyprian, Ad. Don.
5, but the subject is such a commonplace that nothing definite can be
said.; the writer to whom almost all the exegesis
is due, by borrowing of substance or of method, is Origen, except where
the spirit of the fourth century has been at work. Yet other
authors have been consulted, and this not only for general information,
as in the case, already cited, of the elder Pliny, but for
interpretation of the Psalms. For instance, a strange legend
concerning Mount Hermon is cited on Psalm 132, § 6, from a writer
whose name Hilary does not know; and on Psalm 133, § 4, he has
consulted several writers and rejects the opinion of them all.
But these authorities, whoever they may have been, were of
little xliiiimportance for his
purpose in comparison with Origen. Still we can only accept
Jerome’s assertion that the Homilies are translated from Origen
in a qualified sense. Hilary was writing for the edification of
his own flock, and was obliged to modify much that Origen had said if
he would serve their needs, for religious thought had changed rapidly
in the century which lay between the two, and a mere translation would
have been as coldly received as would a reprint of some commentary of
the age of George II. to-day. And Hilary’s was a mind too
active and independent to be the slave of a traditional
interpretation. We must, therefore, expect to find a considerable
divergence; and we cannot be surprised that Hilary, as he settled down
to his task, grew more and more free in his treatment of Origen’s
exegesis.

Unhappily the remains of Origen’s work upon
the Psalms, though considerable, are fragmentary, and of the fragments
scattered through Catenæ no complete or critical edition
has yet been made. Still, insufficient as the material would be
for a detailed study and comparison, enough survives to enable us to
form a general idea of the relation between the two writers.
Origen113113 He is here cited
by the volume and page of the edition by Lommatzsch. His system
of interpretation is admirably described in the fourth of Dr.
Bigg’s Bampton Lectures, The Christian Platonists of
Alexandria. composed Homilies upon the Psalter, a
Commentary upon it, and a summary treatise, called the
Enchiridion. The first of these works was Hilary’s
model; Origen’s Homilies were diffuse extemporary expositions,
ending, like Hilary’s, with an ascription of praise. It is
unfortunate that, of the few which survive, all treat of Psalms on
which Hilary’s Homilies are lost. But it is doubtful
whether Hilary knew the other writings of Origen upon the
Psalter. We have ourselves a very small knowledge of them, for
the Catenæ are not in the habit of giving more than the
name of the author whom they cite. Yet it may well be that some
of the apparent discrepancies between the explanations given by Hilary
and by Origen are due to the loss of the passage from Origen’s
Homily which would have agreed with Hilary, and to the survival of the
different rendering given in the Commentary or the Enchiridion;
some, no doubt, are also due to the carelessness and even dishonesty of
the compilers of Catenæ in stating the authorship of their
selections. But though it is possible that Hilary had access to
all Origen’s writings on the Psalms, there is no reason to
suppose that he possessed a copy of his Hexapla. The only
translation of the Old Testament which he names beside the Septuagint
is that of Aquila; he is aware that there are others, but none save the
Septuagint has authority or deserves respect, and his rare allusions to
them are only such as we find in Origen’s Homilies, and imply no
such exhaustive knowledge of the variants as a possessor of the
Hexapla would have.

A comparison of the two writers shews the
closeness of their relation, and if we had Origen’s complete
Homilies, and not mere excerpts, the debt of Hilary would certainly be
still more manifest. For the compilers of Catenæ have
naturally selected what was best in Origen, and most suited for short
extracts; his eccentricities have been in great measure omitted.
Hence we may err in attributing to Hilary much that is perverse in his
comments; there is an abundance of wild mysticism in the fragments of
Origen, but its proportion to the whole is undoubtedly less in their
present state than in their original condition. Hilary’s
method was that of paraphrasing, not of servile translation.
There is apparently only one literal rendering of an extant passage of
Origen, and that a short one114114 Hil. Tr. in
Ps. 13, § 3, his igitur ita grassantibus, sq. =
Origen (ed. Lommatzsch) xii. 38.; but paraphrases,
which often become very diffuse expansions, are constant115115 E.g. Instr. in
Ps., § 15 = Origen in Eusebius, H.E. vi. 25 (Philocalia
3), Hilary on Ps. 51, §§ 3, 7 = Origen xii. 353, 354, and
very often on Ps. 118 (119), e.g. the Introduction = Or. xiii. 67 f.,
Aleph, § 12 = ib. 70, Beth, § 6 =
ib. 71, Caph, §§ 4, 9 = ib. 82, 83,
&c.. But a just comparison between the two
must embrace their differences as well as their resemblances.
Hilary has exercised a silent criticism in omitting many of
Origen’s textual disquisitions. He gives, it is true, many
various readings, but his confidence in the Septuagint often renders
him indifferent in regard to xlivdivergencies which Origen had taken
seriously. The space which the latter devotes to the Greek
versions Hilary employs in correcting the errors and variations of the
Latin, or in explaining the meaning of Greek words. But these are
matters which rather belong to the next chapter, concerning, as they
do, Hilary’s attitude towards Scripture. It is more
significant of his tone of mind that he has omitted Origen’s
speculations on the resurrection of the body, preserved by
Epiphanius116116Hæres. 64,
12 f., and on the origin
of evil117117 Origen xiii.
134. Hilary has omitted this from his Homily on Ps. 134, §
12.. Again, Origen delights to give his
readers a choice of interpretations; Hilary chooses one of those which
Origen has given, and makes no mention of the other. This is his
constant habit in the earlier part of the Homilies; towards the end,
however, he often gives a rendering of his own, and also mentions,
either as possible or as wrong, that which Origen had offered. Or
else, though he only makes his own suggestion, yet it is obvious to
those who have Origen at hand that he has in his mind, and is refuting
for his own satisfaction, an alternative which he does not think good
to lay before his audience118118 Instances of
such independence are Ps. 118, Daleth, § 6 (xiii. 74), 119,
§ 15 (ib. 108), 122, § 2 (ib. 112), 133, §
3 (ib. 131). The references to Origen are in
brackets.. A similar
liberty with his original occurs in the Homily on Psalm 135, §
12:—‘The purposes of the present discourse and of this
place forbid us to search more deeply.’ This must have
seemed a commonplace to his hearers; but it happens that Origen’s
speculations upon the passage have survived, and we can see that Hilary
was rather making excuses to himself for his disregard of them than
directly addressing his congregation. Apart from the numerous
instances where Hilary derives a different result from the same data,
there are certain cases where he accepts the current Latin text, though
it differed from Origen’s Greek, and draws, without any reference
to Origen, his own conclusions as to the meaning119119 E.g. Ps. 118,
Heth, § 10, 121, § 1; Origen xiii. 80, 111.. These, again, seem to be confined to
the latter part of the work, and may be the result of occasional
neglect to consult the authorities, rather than a deliberate departure
from Origen’s teaching.

But the chief interest of the comparison between
the writings of these two Fathers upon the Psalms lies in the insight
which it affords into their respective modes of thought.
Fragmentary as they are, Origen’s words are a manifestly genuine
and not inadequate expression of his mind; and Hilary, a recognised
authority and conscious of his powers, has so moulded and transformed
his original, now adapting and now rejecting, that he has made it, even
on the ground which is common to both, a true and sufficient
representation of his own mental attitude. The Roman contrasts
broadly with the Greek. He constantly illustrates his discourse
with historical incidents of Scripture, taken in their literal sense;
there are few such in Origen. Origen is full, as usual, of
praises of the contemplative state; in speculation upon Divine things
consists for him the happiness everywhere promised to the saints.
Hilary ignores abstract speculation, whether as a method of
interpretation or as a hope for the future, and actually
describes120120Ps. 118,
Gimel, § 21. the contemplation of
God’s dealings with men as merely one among other modes of
preparation for eternal blessings. In the same discourse he
paraphrases the words of Origen, ‘He who has done all things that
conduce to the knowledge of God,’ by ‘They who have the
abiding sense of a cleansed heart121121 Origen xiii. 72;
Hilary, Ps. 118, Gimel, § 1..’
Though he is the willing slave of the allegorical method, yet he
revolts from time to time against its excesses in Origen; their
treatment of Psalm 126, in the one case practical, in the other
mystical, is a typical example122122 Cf. also Ps.
118, Heth, § 7, Koph, § 4, with Origen xiii.
79, 98. Here again the spirit of independence manifests itself
towards the end of the work..
Hilary’s attention is fixed on concrete things; the enemies
denounced in the Psalms mean for him the heretics of the day, while
Origen had recognised in them the invisible agency of evil
spirits123123 Cf. Ps. 118,
Samech, § 6; Origen xiii. 92.. The words ‘Who teacheth my
hands to fight’ suggest to Origen intellectual weapons and
victories; they remind Hilary of the ‘I have xlvovercome the world’ of
Christ124124Ps. 143, § 4;
Origen xiii. 149.. In fact, the thought of Hilary was
so charged with definite convictions concerning Christ, and so
impressed with their importance that his very earnestness and
concentration betrays him into error of interpretation. It would
be an insufficient, yet not a false, contrast between him and Origen to
say that the latter distorts, with an almost playful ingenuity, the
single words or phrases of Scripture, while Hilary, with masterful
indifference to the principles of exegesis, will force a whole chapter
to render the sense which he desires. And his obvious sincerity,
his concentration of thought upon one great and always interesting
doctrine, his constant appeal to what seems to be, and sometimes is,
the exact sense of Scripture, and the vigour of his style, far better
adapted to its purpose than that of Origen; all these render him an
even more convincing exponent than the other of the bad system of
interpretation which both have adopted. Sound theological
deductions and wise moral reflections on every page make the reader
willing to pardon a vicious method, for Hilary’s doctrine is
never based upon his exegesis of the Psalms. No primary truth
depends for him upon allegory or mysticism, and it may be that he used
the method with the less caution because he looked for nothing more
than that it should illustrate and confirm what was already
established. Since, then, the permanent interest of the work is
that it shews us what seemed to Hilary, as a representative of his age,
to be the truth, and we have in it a powerful and original presentation
of that truth, we can welcome, as a quaint and not ungraceful
enlivening of his argument, this ingenuity of misinterpretation.
And we may learn also a lesson for ourselves of the importance of the
doctrine which he inculcates with such perseverance. Confronting
him as it did, in various aspects, at every turn and in the most
unlikely places during his journey through the Psalter, his faith
concerning Christ was manifestly in Hilary’s eyes the vital
element of religion.

The Homilies on the Psalms have never been
a popular work. Readable as they are, and free from most of the
difficulties which beset the De Trinitate, posterity allowed
them to be mutilated, and, as we saw, only a portion has come down to
us. Their chief influence, like that of the other treatise, has
been that which Hilary has exercised through them upon writers of
greater fame. Ambrose has borrowed from them liberally and quite
uncritically for his own exposition of certain of the Psalms; and
Ambrose, accredited by his own fame and that of his greater friend
Augustine, has quite overshadowed the fame of Hilary. The
Homilies may, perhaps, have also suffered from an undeserved suspicion
that anything written by the author of the De Trinitate would be
hard to read. They have, in any case, been little read; and yet,
as the first important example in Latin literature of the allegorical
method, and as furnishing the staple of a widely studied work of St.
Ambrose, they have profoundly affected the course of Christian
thought. Their historical interest as well as their intrinsic
value commands our respect.

In his Homily on Psalm 138, § 4, Hilary
briefly mentions the Patriarchs as examples of faith and adds,
‘but these are matters of which we must discourse more suitably
and fully in their proper place.’ This is a promise to
which till of late no known work of our writer corresponded.
Jerome had, indeed, informed us125125Vir. Ill.
100. that Hilary had
composed a treatise entitled De Mysteriis, but no one had
connected it with his words in the Homily. It had been supposed
that the lost treatise dealt with the sacraments, in spite of the facts
that it is Hilary’s custom to speak of types as
‘mysteries,’ and that the sacraments are a theme upon which
he never dwells. But in 1887 a great portion of Hilary’s
actual treatise on the Mysteries was recovered in the same manuscript
which contained the more famous Pilgrimage to the Holy Places of
Silvia of Aquitaine126126 J. F. Gamurrini,
S. Hilarii Tractatus de Mysteriis et Hymni, etc., 4to., Rome,
1887. The De Mysteriis occupies pp. 3–28.. It is a
short treatise of two books, unhappily mutilated at the beginning, in
the middle and near the end, though the peroration has survived.
The title is xlvilost, but
there is no reason to doubt that Jerome was nearly right in calling it
a tractatus, though he would have done better had he used the
plural. It is written in the same easy style as the Homilies
on the Psalms, and if it was not originally delivered as two
homilies, as is probable, it must be a condensation of several
discourses into a more compact form. The first book deals with
the Patriarchs, the second with the Prophets, regarded as types of
Christ. The whole is written from the point of view with which
Hilary’s other writings have made us familiar. Every deed
recorded in Scripture proclaims or typifies or proves the advent of the
incarnate Christ, and it is Hilary’s purpose to display the whole
of His work as reflected in the Old Testament, like an image in a
mirror. He begins with Adam and goes on to Moses, deriving
lessons from the lives of all the chief characters, often with an
exercise of great ingenuity. For instance, in the history of the
Fall Eve is the Church, which is sinful but shall be saved through
bearing children in Baptism127127 Ed. Gamurrini, p.
5.; the burning bush
is a type of the endurance of the Church, of which St. Paul speaks
in 2 Cor. iv.
8128128Ib. p.
17.; the manna was found in the
morning, the time of Christ’s Resurrection and therefore of the
reception of heavenly food in the Eucharist. They who collect too
much are heretics with their excess of argument129129Ib. p.
21; there is the not uncommon play on the two senses of
colligere.. In the second book we have a
fragmentary and desultory treatment of incidents in the lives of the
Prophets, which Hilary ends by saying that in all the events which he
has recorded we recognise ‘God the Father and God the Son, and
God the Son from God the Father, Jesus Christ, God and Man130130Ib. p. 27..’ The peroration, in fact, reads
like a summary of the argument of the De Trinitate. Of the
genuineness of the little work there can be no doubt. Its
language, its plan, its arguments are unmistakably those of
Hilary131131 It must be
confessed that some authorities refuse to regard this work as the De
Mysteriis of Hilary. Among these is Ebert, Litteratur des
Mittelalters, p. 142, who admits that the matter might be
Hilary’s, but denies that the manner and style are
his.. The homilies were probably delivered
soon after he had finished his course on the Psalms, of which they
contain some reminiscences, such as we saw are found in the later
Homilies on the Psalms of earlier passages in the same. In
all probability the subject matter of the De Mysteriis is mainly
drawn from Origen. It is too short, and too much akin to
Hilary’s more important writings, to cast much light upon his
modes of thought. He has, indeed, no occasion to speak here upon
the points on which his teaching is most original and
characteristic.

In this same manuscript, discovered by Gamurrini
at Arezzo, are the remains of what professes to be Hilary’s
collection of hymns. He has always had the fame of being the
earliest Latin hymn writer. This was, indeed, a task which the
circumstances of his life must have suggested to him. The
conflict with Arianism forced him to become the pioneer of systematic
theology in the Latin tongue; it also drove him into exile in the East,
where he must have acquainted himself with the controversial use made
of hymnody by the Arians. Thus it was natural that he should have
introduced hymns also into the West. But if the De
Trinitate had little success, the hymns were still more
unfortunate. Jerome tells us that Hilary complained of finding
the Gauls unteachable in sacred song132132Comm. in Ep. ad
Gal. ii. pref.: Hilarius in hymnorum
carmine Gallos indociles vocat. This may mean that Hilary
actually used the words ‘stubborn Gauls’ in one of his
hymns. There would be nothing extraordinary in this; the early
efforts, and especially those of the Arians which Hilary imitated for a
better purpose, often departed widely from the propriety of later
compositions, as we shall see in one of those attributed to Hilary
himself.; and there is
no reason to suppose that he had any wide or permanent success in
introducing hymns into public worship133133 It is true
that the Fourth Council of Toledo (a.d. 633)
in its 13th canon couples Hilary with Ambrose as the writer of hymns in
actual use. But these canons are verbose productions, and this
may be a mere literary flourish, natural enough in countrymen and
contemporaries of Isidore of Seville, who knew, no doubt from
Jerome’s Viri Illustres, that Hilary was the first Latin
hymn writer.. If
Hilary must have the credit of originality in this respect, the honour
of turning his suggestion to account belongs to Ambrose, whose fame in
more respects than one is built upon foundations laid by the
other. And if but a scanty remnant of the verse of Ambrose,
popular as it was, survives, we cannot be surprised that not a line
remains which can safely be xlviiattributed to Hilary, though authorities who
deserve respect have pronounced in favour of more than one of the five
hymns which we must consider.

Hilary’s own opinion concerning the use of hymns
can best be learnt from his Homilies of Psalms 64 and 65. In the former
(§ 12) the Church’s delightful exercise of singing hymns at
morning and evening is one of the chief tokens which she has of
God’s mercy towards her. In the latter (§ 1) we are
told that sacred song requires the accompaniment of instrumental
harmonies; that the combination to this end of different forms of
service and of art produces a result acceptable to God. The
lifting of the voice to God in exultation, as an act of spiritual
warfare against the devil and his hosts, is given as an example of the
uses of hymnody (§ 4). It is a means of putting the enemy to
flight; ‘Whoever he be that takes his post outside the Church,
let him hear the voice of the people at their prayers, let him mark the
multitudinous sound of our hymns, and in the performance of the divine
Sacraments let him recognise the responses which our loyal confession
makes. Every adversary must needs be affrighted, the devil
routed, death conquered in the faith of the Resurrection, by such
jubilant utterance of our exultant voice. The enemy will know
that this gives pleasure to God and assurance to our hope, even this
public and triumphant raising of our voice in song.’
Original composition, both of words and music, is evidently in
Hilary’s mind; and we can see that he is rather recommending a
useful novelty than describing an established practice. It is a
remarkable coincidence that the five hymns which are called his are, in
fact, a song of triumph over the devil, and a hymn in praise of the
Resurrection, which are, so their editor thinks, actually alluded to in
the Homily cited above; a confession of faith; and a morning hymn and
one which has been taken for an evening hymn. These are exactly
the subjects which correspond to Hilary’s description.

But, when we come to the examination of these
hymns in detail, the gravest doubts arise. The first three were
discovered in the same manuscript to which we owe the De
Mysteriis. They formed part of a small collection, which
cannot have numbered more than seven or eight hymns, of which these
three only have escaped, not without some mutilation. That which
stands first is the confession of faith, the matter of which contains
nothing that is inconsistent with Hilary’s time. But beyond
this, and the fact that the manuscript ascribes it to Hilary, there is
nothing to suggest his authorship. It is a dreary production in a
limping imitation of an Horatian metre; an involved argumentative
statement of Catholic doctrine, in which it would be difficult to say
whether verse or subject suffers the more from their unwanted
union. The sequence of thought is helped out by the mechanical
device of an alphabetical arrangement of the stanzas, but even this
assistance could not make it intelligible to an ordinary
congregation134134 Two of the simplest
stanzas are as follows:— Extra quam caper potest mens humana manet Filius in Patre, rursus quem penes sit Pater dignus, qui genitus est Filius in Deum. Felix quid potuit fide res tantas penitus credulus assequi, ut incorporeo ex Deo profectus fuerit primogenitus Dei. It is written in stanzas of six
lines in the ms.; the metre is the second
Asclepiad. Gamurrini, the discoverer, and Fechtrup (in
Wetzer-Welte’s Encyclopædia) regard it as the work of
Hilary, but the weight of opinion is against them.. And
the want of literary skill in the author makes it impossible to suppose
that Hilary is he; classical knowledge was still on too high a level
for an educated man to perpetrate such solecisms.

In the same manuscript there follow, after an
unfortunate gap, the two hymns to which it has been suggested that
Hilary alludes in his Homily on Psalm 65, those which celebrate the
praises of the Resurrection and the triumph over Satan. The
former is by a woman’s hand, and the feminine forms of the
language must have made it, one would think, unsuitable for
congregational singing. There is no reason why the poem should
not date from the fourth century; indeed, since it is written by a
neophyte, that date is more probable than a later time, when adult
converts to Christianity were more scarce. It has considerable
merits; it is xlviiifervid in tone
and free in movement, and has every appearance of being the expression
of genuine feeling. It is, in fact, likely enough that, if it
were written in Hilary’s day, he should have inserted it in a
collection of sacred verse. Concerning its authorship the
suggestion has been made135135 By Gamurrini in
Studì e documenti, 1884, p. 83 f. that it was written
by Florentia, a heathen maiden converted by Hilary near Seleucia, who
followed him to Gaul, lived, died, and was buried by him in his
diocese. The story of Florentia rests on no better authority than
the worthless biography of Hilary, written by Fortunatus, who,
moreover, says nothing about hymns composed by her. Neither proof
nor disproof is possible: unless we regard the defective Latinity as
evidence in favour of a Greek origin for the authoress. The third
hymn, which celebrates the triumph of Christ over Satan, may or may not
be the work of the same hand as the second. It bears much more
resemblance to it than to the laborious and prosaic effusion which
stands first. The manuscript which contains these three hymns
distinctly assigns the first, and one or more which have perished, to
Hilary:—‘Incipiunt hymni eiusdem.’
Whether a fresh title stood before the later hymns, which clearly
belong to another, we cannot say; the collection is too short for this
to be probable. It is obvious that, if we have in this manuscript
the remains of a hymn-book for actual use, it was, like ours, a
compilation; brief as it was, it may have been as large as the cumbrous
shape of ancient volumes would allow to be cheaply multiplied and
conveniently used. Many popular treatises, as for instance some
by Tertullian and Cyprian, were quite as short. Who the compiler
may have been must remain unknown. We must attach some importance
to the evidence of the manuscript which has restored to us the De
Mysteriis and the Pilgrimage of Silvia; and we may
reasonably suppose that this collection was made in the time, and even
with the sanction, of Hilary, though we cannot accept him as the author
of any of the three hymns which remain.

The spurious letter to his imaginary daughter Abra
was apparently written with the ingenious purpose of fathering upon
Hilary the morning hymn, Lucis Largitor splendide. This is
a hymn of considerable beauty, in the same metre as the genuine
Ambrosian hymns. But there is this essential difference, that
while in the latter the rules of classical versification as regards the
length of syllables are scrupulously followed, in the former these
rules are ignored, and rhythm takes the place of quantity. This
is a sufficient proof that the hymn is of a later date than Ambrose,
and, a fortiori, than Hilary. There remains the so-called
evening hymn, which has been supposed to be the companion to the
last136136 Printed in full
by Mai, Patrum Nova Bibliotheca, p. 490. He suspends
judgment, and will not say that it is unworthy of Hilary. The
Benedictine editor, Coustant, gives a few stanzas as specimens, and
summarily rejects it.. This, again, is alphabetical, and
contains in twenty-three stanzas a confession of sin, an appeal to
Christ and an assertion of orthodoxy. The rules of metre are
neglected in favour of an uncouth attempt at rhythm. Latin
appears to have been a dead language to the writer137137 The four quarters of
the universe are ortus, occasus, aquilo, septentrio; one
of these last must mean the south. This would point to some
German land as the home of the author; in no country of Romance tongue
could such an error have been perpetrated. Perire is used
for perdere, but this is not unparalleled., who adorns his lines with little pieces
of pagan mythology, and whose taste is indicated by his description of
heretics as ‘barking Sabellius and grunting Simon.’
The hymn is probably the work of some bombastic monk, perhaps of the
time of Charles the Great; unlike the other four, it cannot possibly
date from Hilary’s generation.

Omitting certain fragments of treatises of which
Hilary may, or may not, have been the author138138 In
Mai’s Patrum Nova Bibliotheca, vol. i., is a short
treatise on the Genealogies of Christ. The method of
interpretation is the same as Hilary’s, but the language is not
his; and the terms used of the Virgin in §§ 11, 12, are not
as early as the fourth century. In the same volume is an
exposition of the beginning of St. John’s Gospel in an anti-Arian
sense. In spite of some difference of vocabulary, there is no
strong reason why this should not be by Hilary; cf. especially,
§§ 5–7. Mai also prints in the same volume a
short fragment on the Paralytic (St. Matt. ix. 2), too brief for a
judgment to be formed. In Pitra’s Spicilegium
Solesmense, vol. i., is a brief discussion on the first chapters of
Genesis, dealing chiefly with the Fall. It appears, like the
Homilies on the Psalms, to be the report of some extemporary addresses,
and is more likely than any of the preceding to be the work of
Hilary. It is quite in his style, but the contents are
unimportant. But we must remember that the scribes were rarely
content to confess that they were ignorant of the name of an author
whom they transcribed; and that, being as ill-furnished with scruples
as with imagination, they assigned everything that came to hand to a
few familiar names. Two further works ascribed to Hilary are
obviously not his. Pitra, in the volume already cited, has
printed considerable remains of a Commentary on the Pauline Epistles,
which really belongs to Theodore of Mopsuestia; and a Commentary on the
seven Canonical Epistles, recently published in the Spicilegium
Casinense, vol. iii., is there attributed, with much reason, to his
namesake of Arles.,
we now come to his attack upon Auxentius of Milan, and to the last
of xlixhis complete works.
Dionysius of Milan had been, as we saw, a sufferer in the same cause as
Hilary. But he had been still more hardly treated; he had not
only been exiled, but his place had been taken by Auxentius, an Eastern
Arian of the school favoured by Constantius. Dionysius died in
exile, and Auxentius remained in undisputed possession of the
see. He must have been a man of considerable ability; perhaps, as
we have mentioned, he was the creator of the so-called Ambrosian
ritual, and certainly he was the leader of the Arian party in Italy and
the further West. The very fact that Constantius and his advisers
chose him for so great a post as the bishopric of Milan proves that
they had confidence in him. He justified their trust, holding his
own without apparent difficulty at Milan and working successfully in
the cause of compromise at Ariminum and elsewhere. Athanasius
mentions him often and bitterly as a leader of the heretics; and he
must be ranked with Ursacius and Valens as one of the most unscrupulous
of his party. While Constantius reigned Auxentius was, of course,
safe from attack. But at the end of the year 364 Hilary thought
that the opportunity was come. Since his last entry into the
conflict Julian and his successor Jovian had died, and Valentinian had
for some months been Emperor. He had just divided the Roman
Empire with his brother Valens, himself choosing the Western half with
Milan for his capital, while he gave Constantinople and the East to
Valens. The latter was a man of small abilities, unworthy to
reign, and a convinced Arian; Valentinian, with many faults, was a
strong ruler, and favoured the cause of orthodoxy. But he was,
before all else, a soldier and a statesman; his orthodoxy was, perhaps,
a mere acquiescence in the predominant belief among his subjects, and
it had, in any case, much less influence over his conduct than had
Arianism over that of Valens. It must have seemed to Hilary and
to Eusebius of Vercelli that there was danger to the Church in the
possession by Auxentius of so commanding a position as that of bishop
of Milan, with constant access to the Emperor’s ear; and
especially now that the Emperor was new to his work and had no
knowledge, perhaps no strong convictions, concerning the points at
issue. As far as they could judge, their success or failure in
displacing Auxentius would influence the fortunes of the Church for a
generation at least. It would, therefore, be unjust to accuse
Hilary as a mere busy-body. He interfered, it is true, outside
his own province, but it was at a serious crisis; and his knowledge of
the Western Church must have assured him that, if he did not act, the
necessary protest would probably remain unmade.

Hilary, then, in company with his any Eusebius, hastened
to Milan in order to influence the mind of Valentinian against
Auxentius, and to waken the dormant orthodoxy of the Milanese
Church. For there seems to have been little local opposition to
the Arian bishop: no organised congregation of Catholics in the
city rejected his communion. On the other hand, there was no
militant Arianism; the worship conducted by Auxentius could excite no
scruples, and in his teaching he would certainly avoid the points of
difference. He and his school had no desire to persecute
orthodoxy because it was orthodox. From their point of view, the
Faith had been settled in such a way that their own position was
unassailable, and all they wished was to live and to let live.
And we must remember that the Council of Rimini, disgraceful as the
manner was in which its decision had been reached, was still the rule
of the Faith for the Western Church. Hilary and Eusebius had
induced a multitude of bishops, amid the applause of their flocks, to
recant; but private expressions of opinion, however numerous, could not
erase the definitions of Rimini from lthe records of the Church. It was
not till the year 369 that a Council at Rome expunged them. The
first object of the allies was to excite opposition to the Arian, and
in this they had some success. Auxentius, in his petition to the
Emperor, which we possess, asserts that they stirred up certain of the
laity, who had been in communion neither with himself nor with his
predecessors, to call him a heretic. The immediate predecessor of
Auxentius was the Catholic Dionysius, and we cannot suppose that this
is a fair description of Hilary’s followers. But it is
probable that the malcontents were not numerous, for none but
enthusiasts would venture into apparent schism on account of a heresy
which was certainly not conspicuous. How long Hilary was allowed
to continue his efforts is unknown. Valentinian reached Milan in
the November of 364, and left it in the Autumn of the following year;
and before his departure his decision had frustrated Hilary’s
purpose. We only know that, as soon as the matter grew serious,
Auxentius appealed to the Emperor. There was no point more
important in the eyes of the government than unity within the local
Churches, and Auxentius, being formally in the right, must have made
his appeal with much confidence. His success was immediate.
The Emperor issued what Hilary calls a ’grievous edict139139Contra
Auxentium, §7.,’ the terms of which Hilary does not
mention. He only says that under the pretext, and with the
desire, of unity, Valentinian threw the faithful Church of Milan into
confusion. In other words, he forbade Hilary to agitate for a
separation of the people from their bishop.

But Hilary, silenced in the city, exerted himself
at court. With urgent importunity, he tells us, he pressed his
charges against Auxentius, and induced the Emperor to appoint a
commission to consider them. In due time this commission
met. It consisted of two lay officials, with ‘some
ten’ bishops as assessors140140 It is clear from
Hilary’s account (Contra Auxentium, § 7) that the
decision lay with the laymen. Auxentius, in his account of the
matter, does not even mention the bishops.. Hilary and
Eusebius were present, as well as the accused. Auxentius pleaded
his own cause, beginning with the unfortunate attack upon his
adversaries that they had been deposed by Council, and therefore had no
locus standi as accusers of a bishop. This was untrue;
Hilary, we know, had been banished, but his see had never been declared
vacant, nor, in all probability, had that of Eusebius. They were
not intruders, like Auxentius, though even he had gained some legality
for his position from the death of Dionysius in exile. The
failure of this plea was so complete that Hilary, in his account of the
matter, declares that it is not worth his while to repeat his
defence. Next came the serious business of the commission.
This was not the theological enquiry after truth, but the legal
question whether, in fact, the teaching of Auxentius was in conformity
with recognised standards. Hilary had asserted that his creed
differed from that of the Emperor and of all other Christians, and had
asserted it in very unsparing language. He now maintained his
allegation, and, in doing so, gave Auxentius a double advantage.
For he diverged into the general question of theology, while Auxentius
stuck to the letter of the decisions of Rimini; and the words of Hilary
had been such that he could claim to be a sufferer from calumny.
Hilary’s account of the doctrinal discussion is that he forced
the reluctant Auxentius by his questions to the very edge of a denial
of the Faith; that Auxentius escaped from this difficulty by a complete
surrender, to which Hilary pinned him down by making him sign an
orthodox confession, in terms to which he had several times agreed
during the course of the debate; that Hilary remitted this confession
through the Quæstor, the lay president of the commission, to the
Emperor. This document, which Hilary says that he appended to his
explanatory letter, is unfortunately lost. The brief account of
the matter which Auxentius gives is not inconsistent with
Hilary’s. He tells us that he began by protesting that he
had never known or seen Arius, and did not even know what his
lidoctrine was; he proceeded to
declare that he still believed and preached the truths which he had
been taught in his infancy and of which he had satisfied himself by
study of Scripture; and he gives a summary of the statement of faith
which he made before the commission. But he says not a word about
the passage of arms between Hilary and himself, of his defeat, and of
the enforced signature of a confession which contradicted his previous
assertions.

Hilary’s account of the proceedings must certainly
be accepted. But, though his moral and dialectical victory was
complete, it is obvious that he had gained no advantage for his
cause. He had taunted Auxentius as an adherent of Arius.
Auxentius had an immediate reply, which put his opponent in the
wrong. We cannot doubt that he spoke the truth, when he said that
he had never known Arius; and it certainly was the case, that in the
early years of the fourth century, inadequate statements of the
doctrine of the Trinity were widely prevalent and passed without
dispute. It was also true that the dominant faction at the court
of Constantius, of which Auxentius had been a leader, had in the most
effectual way disclaimed complicity with Arianism by ejecting its
honest professors from their sees and by joining with their lips in the
universal condemnation of the founder of that heresy. But if this
was their shame, it was also, in such circumstances as those of
Auxentius, their protection. And Auxentius held one of the
greatest positions in the church, and even in the state, now that Milan
was to be, so it seemed, the capital of the West. The spirit of
the government at that time was one of almost Chinese reverence for
official rank; and it must have seemed an outrage that the
irresponsible bishop of a city, mean in comparison with Milan, should
assail Auxentius in such terms as Hilary had used. Even though he
had admitted, instead of repudiating, the affinity with Arius, there
would have been an impropriety in the use of that familiar weapon, the
labelling of a party with the name of its most discredited and
unpopular member. We may be sure that Auxentius, a man of the
world, would derive all possible advantage from this excessive
vehemence of his adversary. In the debate itself, where Hilary
would have the advantage not only of a sound cause, but of greater
earnestness, we cannot be surprised that he won the victory.
Auxentius was probably indifferent at heart; Hilary had devoted his
life and all his talents to the cause, but such a victory could have no
results, beyond lowering Auxentius in public esteem and
self-respect. It does not appear from his words or from those of
Hilary, that the actual creed of Rimini was imported into the
dispute. It was on it that Auxentius relied; if he did not
expressly contradict its terms, the debate became a mere discussion
concerning abstract truth. The legal standard of doctrine was no
more affected by his unwilling concession than it had been a few years
before by the numerous repudiations, prompted by Hilary and Eusebius,
of the vote given at Rimini. The confession which Hilary annexed
in triumph to his narrative was the mere incidental expression of a
private opinion, which Auxentius, in his further plea, could afford to
leave unnoticed.

The commissioners no doubt made their report privately
to the Emperor. We do not know its tenour, but from the sequel we
may be sure that they gave it as their opinion that Auxentius was the
lawful bishop of Milan. Some time passed before Valentinian
spoke. Whether Hilary took any further steps to influence his
decision is unknown; but we possess a memorial addressed ‘to the
most blessed and glorious Emperors Valentinian and Valens’ by
Auxentius. The two brothers were, by mutual arrangement, each
sovereign within his own dominion, but they ruled as colleagues, not as
rivals; and Auxentius must have taken courage from the thought that it
would seem unnatural and impolitic for the elder to seize this first
opportunity of proclaiming his dissent from the cherished convictions
of the younger, by degrading one of the very school which his brother
delighted to honour. For what had been proposed was not the
silent filling of a vacant place, but the public ejection of a bishop
whose liistation was not much
less prominent than that of Athanasius himself, and his ejection on
purely theological grounds. Constantius himself had rarely been
so bold; his acts of oppression, as in Hilary’s case, were
usually cloaked by some allegation of misconduct on the victim’s
part. But Auxentius had more than the character of Valens and
political considerations on which to rely. In the forefront of
his defence he put the Council of Rimini. This attack by Hilary
and his friends was, according to him, the attempt of a handful of men
to break up the unity attained by the labours of that great assembly of
six hundred bishops141141 This was a gross
exaggeration. They cannot have been more than 400, and probably
were less and we must remember that the Homoean decision was only
obtained by fraud, as Auxentius well knew.. He declared
his firm assent to all its decisions; every heresy that it had
condemned he condemned. He sent with his address a copy of the
Acts of the Council, and begged the Emperor to have them read to
him. Its language would convince him that Hilary and Eusebius,
bishops long deposed, were merely plotting universal schism.
This, with his own account of the proceedings before the commission and
a short statement of his belief, forms his appeal to the Emperor.
It was composed with great skill, and was quite unanswerable. His
actual possession of the see, the circumstances of the time, the very
doctrine of the Church—for only a Council could undo what a
Council had done—rendered his position unassailable. And if
he was in the right, Hilary and his colleague were in the wrong.
Nothing but success could have saved them from the humiliation to which
they were now subjected, of being expelled from Milan and bidden to
return to their homes, while the Emperor publicly recognised Auxentius
by receiving the Communion at his hands. Yet morally they had
been in the right throughout. The strong legal position of
Auxentius and the canons of that imposing Council of six hundred
bishops behind which he screened himself had been obtained by
deliberate fraud and oppression. He and his creed could not have,
and did not deserve to have, any stability. Yet Valentinian was
probably in the right, even in the interests of truth, in refusing to
make a martyr of Auxentius. There would have been reprisals in
the East, where the Catholic cause had far more to lose than had
Arianism in the West; and general considerations of equity and policy
must have inclined him to allow the Arian to pass the remainder of his
days in peace. But we cannot wonder that Hilary failed to
appreciate such reasons. He had thrown himself with all his heart
into the attack, and risked in it his public credit as bishop and
confessor and first of Western theologians. Hence his published
account of the transaction is tinged with a pardonable shade of
personal resentment. It was, indeed, necessary that he should
issue a statement. The assault and the repulse were rendered
conspicuous by time and place, and by the eminence of the persons
engaged; and it was Hilary’s duty to see that the defeat which he
had incurred brought no injury upon his cause. He therefore
addressed a public letter ‘to the beloved brethren who abide in
the Faith of the fathers and repudiate the Arian heresy, the bishops
and all their flocks.’ He begins by speaking of the
blessings of peace, which the Christians of that day could neither
enjoy nor promote, beset as they were by the forerunners of Antichrist,
who boasted of the peace, in other words of the harmonious concurrence
in blasphemy, which they had brought about. They bear themselves
not as bishops of Christ but as priests of Antichrist. This is
not random abuse (§ 2), but sober recognition of the fact, stated
by St. John, that there are many Antichrists. For these men
assume the cloak of piety, and pretend to preach the Gospel, with the
one object of inducing others to deny Christ. It was (§ 3)
the misery and folly of the day that men endeavoured to promote the
cause of God by human means and the favour of the world. Hilary
asks bishops, who believe in their office, whether the Apostles had
secular support when by their preaching they converted the greater part
of mankind. They were not adorned with palace dignities; scourged
and fettered, they sang their hymns. It was in obedience to no
royal edict that Paul gathered a Church for Christ; liiihe was exposed to public view in the
theatre. Nero and Vespasian and Decius were no patrons of the
Church; it was through their hatred that the truth had thriven.
The Apostles laboured with their hands and worshipped in garrets and
secret places, and in defiance of senate or monarch visited, it might
be said, every village and every tribe. Yet it was these rebels
who had the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven; the more they were
forbidden, the more they preached, and the power of God was made
manifest. But now (§ 4) the Faith finds favour with men.

The Church seeks for secular support, and in so doing
insults Christ by the implication that his support is
insufficient. She in her turn holds out the threat of exile and
prison. It was her endurance of these that drew men to her; now
she imposes her faith by violence. She craves for favours at the
hands of her communicants; once it was her consecration that she braved
the threatenings of persecutors. Bishops in exile spread the
Faith; now it is she that exiles bishops. She boasts that the
world loves her; the world’s hatred was the evidence that she was
Christ’s. The ruin is obvious which has fallen upon the
Church. The time of Antichrist, disguised as an angel of light,
has come. The true Christ is hidden from almost every mind and
heart. Antichrist is now obscuring the truth that he may assert
falsehood hereafter. Hence the conflicting opinions of the time,
the doctrine of Arius and of his heirs, Valens, Ursacius, Auxentius and
their fellows. Their preaching of novelties concerning Christ is
the work of Antichrist, who is using them to introduce his own
worship. This is proved (§ 6) by a statement of their
minimising and prevaricating doctrine, which has, however, made no
impression upon the guileless and well-meaning laity. Then
(§§ 7–9) comes Hilary’s account of his
proceedings at Milan, strongly coloured by the intensity of his
feelings. The Emperor’s first refusal to interfere with
Auxentius is a ‘command that the Church of the Milanese, which
confesses that Christ is true God, of one divinity and substance with
the Father, should be thrown into confusion under the pretext, and with
the desire, of unity.’ The canons of Rimini are described
as those of the Thracian Nicæa; Auxentius’ protest that he
had never known Arius is met by the assertion that he had been ordained
to the presbyterate in an Arian Church under George of
Alexandria. Hilary refuses to discuss the Council of Rimini; it
had been universally and righteously repudiated. His ejection
from Milan, in spite of his protests that Auxentius was a liar and a
renegade, is a revelation of the mystery of ungodliness. For
Auxentius (§§ 10, 11) had spoken with two contrary voices;
the one that of the confession which Hilary had driven him to sign, the
other that of Rimini. His skill in words could deceive even the
elect, but he had been clearly exposed. Finally (§ 12)
Hilary regrets that he cannot state the case to each bishop and Church
in person. He begs them to make the best of his letter; he dares
not make it fully intelligible by circulating with it the Arian
blasphemies which he had assailed. He bids them beware of
Antichrist, and warns against love and reverence for the material
structure of their churches, wherein Antichrist will one day have his
seat. Mountains and woods and dens of beasts and prison and
morasses are the places of safety; in them some of the Prophets had
lived, and some had died. He bids them shun Auxentius as an angel
of Satan, an enemy of Christ, a deceiver and a blasphemer.
‘Let him assemble against me what synods he will, let him
proclaim me, as he has often done already, a heretic by public
advertisement, let him direct, at his will, the wrath of the mighty
against me; yet, being an Arian, he shall be nothing less than a devil
in my eyes. Never will I desire peace except with them who,
following the doctrine of our fathers at Nicæa, shall make the
Arians anathema and proclaim the true divinity of Christ.’

These are the concluding words of Hilary’s last
public utterance. We see him again giving an unreserved adhesion,
in word as well as in heart, to the Nicene confession. It was the
course dictated by policy as well as by conviction. His cautious
language in earlier days had done good service to the Church in the
East, and had made it easier for those who had compromised themselves
at Rimini to reconcile themselves with him and with the truth for
livwhich he stood. But by
this time all whom he could wish to win had given in their adhesion;
Auxentius and the few who held with him, if such there were, were
irreconcilable. They took their stand upon the Council of Rimini,
and their opponents found in the doctrine of Nicæa the clear and
uncompromising challenge which was necessary for effective
warfare. But if Hilary’s doctrinal position is definite,
his theory of the relations of church and State, if indeed his
indignation allowed him to think of them, is obscure. An orthodox
Emperor was upholding an Arian, and Hilary, while giving Valentinian
credit for personal good faith, is as eager as in the worst days of
Constantius for a severance. We must, however, remember that this
manifesto, though it is the expression of a settled policy in the
matter of doctrine, is in other respects the unguarded outpouring of an
injured feeling. And here again we find the old perplexity of the
‘inward evil.’ Auxentius is represented as in the
church and outside it at the same time. He is an Antichrist, a
devil, all that is evil; but Hilary is threatened and it is the Church
that threatens, submission to an Arian is enforced and it is the church
which enforces it142142 §4.. And if
Auxentius had adhered to the confession which Hilary had induced him to
sign, all objection to his episcopate would apparently have
ceased. The time had not come, if it ever can come, for the
solution of such problems. Meantime Hilary did his best, so far
as words could do it, to brush aside the sophistries behind which
Auxentius was defending himself. The doctrine of Rimini is named
that of Nicæa, in Thrace, where the discreditable and
insignificant assembly met in which its terms were settled; the Church
of Alexandria under the intruder George is frankly called Arian.
It was an appeal to the future as well as an apology for himself.
But certainly it could not move Valentinian, nor can Hilary have
expected that it should. And, after all, Valentinian’s
action was harmless, at least. By Hilary’s own confession,
Auxentius had no influence for evil over his flock, and these
proceedings must have warned him, if he needed the warning, that
abstinence from aggressive Arianism was necessary if he would end his
days in peace. The Emperor’s policy remained
unchanged. At the Roman Council of the year 369 the Western
bishops formally annulled the proceedings of Rimini, and so deprived
Auxentius of his legal position. At the same time, as the logical
consequence, they condemned him to deposition, but Valentinian refused
to give effect to their sentence, and Auxentius remained bishop of
Milan till his death in the year 374. He had outlived Hilary and
Eusebius, and also Athanasius, the promoter of the last attack upon
him; he had also outlived whatever Arianism there had been in
Milan. His successor, St. Ambrose, had the enthusiastic support
of his people in his conflicts with Arian princes. The Church
could have gained little by Hilary’s success, and yet we cannot
be sure that, in a broad sense, he failed. So resolute a bearing
must have effectually strengthened the convictions of Valentinian and
the fears of Auxentius.

There remains one work of Hilary to be considered.
This was a history of the Arian controversy in such of its
aspects as had fallen under his own observation. We know from
Jerome’s biography of Hilary that he wrote a book against Valens
and Ursacius, containing an account of the Councils of Rimini and
Seleucia. They had been his adversaries throughout his career,
and had held their own against him. To them, at least as much as
to Constantius, the overthrow of his Asiatic friends was due, and to
them he owed the favour, which must have galled him, of permission to
return to his diocese. Auxentius was one of their allies, and the
failure of Hilary’s attack upon him made it clear that these men
too, as subjects of Valentinian, were safe from merited
deposition. Their worldly success was manifest; it was a natural
and righteous task which Hilary undertook when he exposed their true
character. It was clear that while Valens and Valentinian
lived—and they were in early middle life—there would be an
armed peace within the Western Church; that the overthrow of bishop by
bishop in theological strife would be lvforbidden. The pen was the only
weapon left to Hilary, and he used it to give an account of events from
the time of that Council of Arles, in the year 353, which was the
beginning for Gaul of the Arian conflict. He followed its course,
with especial reference to Ursacius and Valens, until the year 367, or
at least the end of 366; the latest incident recorded in the fragments
which we possess must have happened within a few months of his
death. The work was less a history than a collection of documents
strung together by an explanatory narrative. It is evident that
it was not undertaken as a literary effort; its aim is not the
information of future generations, but the solemn indictment at the bar
of public opinion of living offenders. It must have been, when
complete, a singularly businesslike production, with no graces of style
to render it attractive and no generalisations to illuminate its
pages. Had the whole been preserved, we should have had a
complete record of Hilary’s life; as it is, we have thirteen
valuable fragments143143 There are fifteen in
the collection, but the second and third which are as long as the rest
together, and are obviously extracts from the same work, are not by
Hilary. He expressly says (Fragm. i. § 6) that he will
commence with the council of Arles and the exile of Paulinus.
These documents narrate at great length events which began six years
earlier, and with which Hilary and his province had no direct
concern. This proves that the fragments are not a portion of the
Liber adversus Ursacium et Valentem. Internal evidence
proves not less clearly that they cannot be excerpts from some other
work of Hilary. In Fragm. ii. § 21 we are told that
apparently in the year 349, Athanasius excommunicated Marcellus of
Ancyra. It is of course, notorious that he never did so; the
mistake is one which Hilary could not possibly have made. None
the less, these fragments are both in themselves and in the documents
which they embody, one of our most important authorities for the
transactions they narrate, and are indisputably contemporary and
authentic. Nor is there any reasonable doubt as to the
genuineness of the thirteen. Those of them which reveal the
inconstancy of Liberius have been assailed by some Roman Catholic
writers, though they are accepted by others. The same suspicion
has extended to others among the fragments, because they are found in
company with these revelations concerning Liberius. But the
doubts have been suggested by the wish to disbelieve., to which we owe a
considerable part of our general knowledge of the time, though they
tell us comparatively little of his own career. ‘The
commencement of the work has happily survived, and from it we learn the
spirit in which he wrote. He begins (Fragment i. §§ 1,
2) with an exposition of St. Paul’s doctrine of faith, hope, and
love. He testifies, with the Apostle, that the last is the
greatest. The inseparable bond, of which he is conscious, of
God’s love for him and his for God, has detached him from worldly
interests. He, like others (§ 3), might have enjoyed ease
and prosperity and imperial friendship, and have been, as they were, a
bishop only in name and a burden upon the Church. But the
condition imposed was that of tampering with Gospel truths, wilful
blindness to oppression and the condonation of tyranny. Public
opinion, ill-informed and unused to theological subtleties, would not
have observed the change. But it would have been a cowardly
declension from the love of Christ to which he could not stoop.
He feels (§ 4) the difficulty of the task he undertakes. The
devil and the heretics had done their worst, multitudes had been
terrified into denial of their convictions. The story was
complicated by the ingenuity in evil of the plotters, and evidence was
difficult to obtain. The scene of intrigue could not be clearly
delineated, crowded as it was with the busy figures of bishops and
officers, putting every engine into motion against men of apostolic
mind. The energy with which they propagated slander was the
measure of its falsehood. They had implanted in the public mind
the belief that the exiled bishops had suffered merely for refusing to
condemn Athanasius; that they were inspired by obstinacy, not by
principle. Out of reverence for the Emperor, whose throne is from
God (§ 5), Hilary will not comment upon his usurped jurisdiction
over a bishop, nor on the manner in which it was exercised; nor yet on
the injustice whereby bishops were forced to pass sentence upon the
accused in his absence. In this volume he will give the true
causes of trouble, in comparison of which such tyranny, grievous though
it be, is of small account. Once before—this, no doubt, was
at Béziers—he had spoken his mind upon the matter. But
that was a hasty and unprepared utterance, delivered to an audience as
eager to silence him as he was to speak. He will, therefore
(§ 6), give a full and consecutive narrative of events from the
council of Arles onwards, with such an account of the question there
debated as will lvishew
the true merits of Paulinus, and make it clear that nothing less than
the Faith was at stake. He ends his introduction (§ 7) by
warning the reader that this is a work which needs to be seriously
studied. The multitude of letters and of synods which he must
adduce will merely confuse and disgust him, if he do not bear in mind
the dates and the persons, and the exact sense in which terms are
used. Finally, he reminds him of the greatness of the
subject. This is the knowledge of God, the hope of eternity; it
is the duty of a Christian to acquire such knowledge as shall enable
him to form and to maintain his own conclusions. The excerpts
from the work have evidently been made by some one who was interested
in Italy and Illyricum rather than in Gaul, and thought that the
documents were more important than the narrative. Hence
Hilary’s character is as little illustrated as the events of his
life. Nor can the date of the work be precisely fixed. It
is clear that he had already taken up his final attitude of
uncompromising adherence to the Nicene Symbol; that is to say, he began
to write after all the waverers had been reclaimed from contact with
Arianism. He must, therefore, have written the book in his latest
years; and it is manifest that after he had brought the narrative down
to the time of his return from exile, he continued to add to it from
time to time even till the end of his life. For the last incident
recorded in the Fragments, the secession from the party of Valens and
Ursacius of an old and important ally, Germinius of Sirmium, must have
come to his knowledge very shortly before his death. He had had
little success in his warfare with error; if he and his friends had
held their own, they had not succeeded either in synod or at court in
overthrowing their enemies; and it is pleasant to think that this gleam
of comfort came to brighten the last days of Hilary144144 This correspondence
which Hilary has preserved (Fragm. xiii.–xv.) is interesting as
shewing how difficult it must have been for the laity to determine who
was, and who was not, a heretic, when all parties used the same
Scriptural terms in commendation of themselves and condemnation of
their opponents. It begins with a public letter in which
Germinius makes a declaration of faith in Homoeousion terms, without
any mention of the reasons which had induced him to depart from the
Homoean position. This is followed by a reproachful letter, also
intended for publicity, from Valens, Ursacius, and others. They
had refused to attend to the rumour of his defection; but now are
compelled, by his own published letter, to ask the plain question,
whether or not he adheres to ‘the Catholic Faith set forth and
confirmed by the Holy Council at Rimini.’ If he had added
to the Homoean formula, which was that the Son is ‘like the
Father,’ the words ‘in substance’ or ‘in all
things,’ he had fallen into the justly condemned heresy of Basil
of Ancyra. They demand an explicit statement that he never had
said, and never would say, anything of the kind; and warn him that he
is gravely suspected, complaints of his teaching having been made by
certain of his clergy to neighbouring bishops, which they trust will be
proved groundless. Germinius made no direct reply to this letter,
but addressed a manifesto to a number of more sympathetic bishops,
containing the scriptural proofs of the divinity of Christ and
recalling the fact that the Homoean leaders, before their own victory,
had acquiesced in the Homoeousian confession. Any teaching to the
contrary is the work, not of God, but of the spirit of this world, and
he entreats those whom he addresses to circulate his letter as widely
as possible, lest any should fall through ignorance into the snares of
the devil. Germinius was assured of safety in writing thus.
Valentinian’s support of Auxentius had proved that bishops might
hold what opinions they would on the great question provided they were
not avowed Arians. Germinius had been a leader of the Homoean
party, and it is at least possible that his change of front was due to
his knowledge that the Emperor, though he would not eject Homoeans, had
no sympathy with them and would allow them no influence. In fact,
the smaller the share of conscience, the greater the historical
interest of Germinius’ action as shewing the decline of Homoean
influence in the West.. The news must have reached Gaul
early in the year 367, and no subsequent event of importance can have
come to his knowledge.

But though we have reached the term of Hilary’s
life, there remains one topic on which something must be said, his
relation to St. Martin of Tours. Martin, born in Pannonia, the
country of Valens and Ursacius, but converted from paganism under
Catholic influences, was attracted by Hilary, already a bishop, and
spent some years in his society before the outbreak of the Arian strife
in Gaul. Hilary, we are told, wished to ordain him a priest, but
at his urgent wish refrained, and admitted him instead to the humble
rank of an exorcist. At an uncertain date, which cannot have long
preceded Hilary’s exile, he felt himself moved to return to his
native province in order to convert his parents, who were still
pagans. He succeeded in the case of his mother and of many of his
countrymen. But he was soon compelled to abandon his labours, for
he had, as a true disciple of Hilary, regarded it as his duty to oppose
the Arianism dominant in lviithe
province. Opposition to the bishops on the part of a man holding
so low a station in the Church was a civil as well as an ecclesiastical
offence, and Martin can have expected no other treatment than that
which he received, of scourging and expulsion from the province.
Hilary was by this time in exile, and Martin turned to Milan, where the
heresy of the intruder Auxentius called forth his protests, which were
silenced by another expulsion. He next retired to a small island
off the Italian coast, where he lived in seclusion till he heard of
Hilary’s return. He hastened to Rome, so Fortunatus tells
us, to meet his friend, but missed him on the way; and followed him at
once to Poitiers. There Hilary gave him a site near the city, on
which he founded the first monastery in that region, over which he
presided for the rest of Hilary’s life and for four years after
his death. In the year 371 he was consecrated bishop of Tours,
and so continued till his death twenty-five years later. It is
clear that Martin was never able to exert any influence over the mind
or action of Hilary, whose interests were in an intellectual sphere
above his reach. But the courage and tenacity with which Martin
held and preached the Faith was certainly inspired to some considerable
extent by admiration of Hilary and confidence in his teaching.
And the joy which Hilary expresses, as we have seen, in his later
Homilies on the Psalms over the rapid spread of Christianity in
Gaul, was no doubt occasioned by the earlier triumphs of Martin among
the peasantry. The two men were formed each to be the complement
of the other. It was the work of Hilary to prove with cogent
clearness to educated Christians, that reason as well as piety dictated
an acceptance of the Catholic Faith; the mission of Martin was to those
who were neither educated nor Christian, and his success in bringing
the Faith home to the lives and consciences of the pagan masses marks
him out as one of the greatest among the preachers of the Gospel.
Both of them actively opposed Arianism, and both suffered in the
conflict. But the confessorship of neither had any perceptible
share in promoting the final victory of truth. Their true glory
is that they were fellow-labourers equally successful in widely
separate parts of the same field; and Hilary is entitled, beyond the
honour due to his own achievements, to a share in that of St. Martin,
whose merits he discovered and fostered.

We have now reached the end of Hilary’s
life. Sulpicius Severus145145Chron. ii.
45. tells us that he
died in the sixth year from his return. He had probably reached
Poitiers early in the year 361; we have seen that the latest event
recorded in the fragments of his history must have come to his
knowledge early in 367. There is no reason to doubt that this was
the conclusion of the history, and no consideration suggests that
Sulpicius was wrong in his date. We may therefore assign the
death of Hilary, with considerable confidence, to the year 367, and
probably to its middle portion. Of the circumstances of his death
nothing is recorded. This is one of the many signs that his
contemporaries did not value him at his true worth. To them he
must have been the busy and somewhat unsuccessful man of affairs; their
successors in the next generation turned away from him and his works to
the more attractive writings and more commanding characters of Ambrose
and Augustine. Yet certainly no firmer purpose or more convinced
faith, perhaps no keener intellect has devoted itself to the defence
and elucidation of truth than that of Hilary: and it may be that
Christian thinkers in the future will find an inspiration of new and
fruitful thoughts in his writings.

1 An actual dependence on
Gregory of Nyssa has sometimes been ascribed to Hilary. But
Gregory was surely too young for this. He may himself have
borrowed from Hilary; but more probably both derived their common
element from Eastern writers like Basil of Ancyra.

2 This is certainly the
best translation of Tractatus; the word is discussed on a later
page.

3 The latest date which I
have seen assigned for his birth is 320, by Fechtrup, in
Wetzer-Welte’s Encyclopædia. But this is surely
inconsistent with his styling Ursacius and Valens, in his first Epistle
to Constantine, ‘ignorant and unprincipled youths.’
This was written about the year 355 before Hilary knew much of the
Arian controversy or the combatants, and was ludicrously inappropriate,
for Ursacius and Valens were elderly men. He had found the words
either in some of Athanasius’ writings or in the records of the
Council of Sardica, and borrowed them without enquiry. He could
not have done so had he been only some thirty-five years of age; at
fifty-five they are natural enough.

4 It is impossible to
agree with Zingerle (Comment. Wölfflin. p. 218) that Hilary
was under the necessity of using a Greek and Latin Glossary. Such
a passage as Tract. in Ps. cxxxviii. 43, to which he appeals,
shows rather the extent than the smallness of Hilary’s knowledge
of Greek. What he frankly confesses, there as elsewhere, is
ignorance of Hebrew. The words of Jerome (Ep. 34, 3 f.)
about Hilary’s friend, the presbyter Heliodorus, to whom he used
to refer for explanations of Origen on the Psalms, are equally
incapable of being employed to prove Hilary’s defective
Greek. Heliodorus knew Hebrew, and Hilary for want of Hebrew
found Origen’s notes on the Hebrew text difficult to understand,
and for this reason, according to Jerome, used to consult his friend;
not because he was unfamiliar with Greek.

5 His vocabulary is very
poorly treated in the dictionaries; one of the many signs of the
neglect into which he has fallen. There are at least twenty-four
words in the Tractatus super Psalmos which are omitted in the
last edition of Georges’ lexicon, and these good Latin words, not
technical terms invented for purposes of argument. Among the most
interesting is quotiensque for quotienscumque; an
unnoticed use is the frequent cum quando for
quandoquidem. Of Hilary’s other writings there is as
yet no trustworthy text; from them the list of new words could at least
be doubled.

10 Yet he strangely
reproaches his Old Latin Bible with the use of nimis for
ualde, Tract. in Ps. cxxxviii. 38. This employment
of relative for positive terms had been common in literature for at
least a century and a half.

20Tract. in Ps. i. 7,
lxi. 2, lxiii. 5, &c. As usual, Hilary does not name his
opponents.

21 Hilary’s legendary
daughter Abra, to whom he is said to have written a letter printed in
the editions of his works, is now generally abandoned by the best
authorities, e.g. by Fechtrup, the writer, in Wetzer-Welte’s
Encyclopædia, of the best short life of Hilary.

24 This is on the
assumption, which seems probable, that Irenæus was not yet
translated from the Greek. He certainly influenced Tertullian,
and through him Hilary; and his doctrine of the recapitulation
of mankind in Christ, reappearing as it does in Hilary, though not in
Tertullian, suggests that our writer had made an independent study of
Irenæus. Even if the present wretched translation existed,
he would certainly read the Greek.

25 Dr. Bigg’s Bampton
Lectures upon them are full of hints for the student of Hilary.

29Comm. in Matt. v.
1. It may be mentioned that the chapters of the Commentary do not
coincide with those of the Gospel.

30Comm. in Matt.
xvi. 4, theotetam quam deitatem Latini nuncupant, xxvi. 5,
theotetam quam deitatem nuncupamus. The strange accusative
theotetam makes it the more probable that we have here a
specimen of the primitive Greek vocabulary of Latin Christendom of
which so few examples, e.g. Baptism and Eucharist, have survived.
Cyprian had probably the chief share in destroying it; but the subject
has never been examined as it deserves.

31 So especially xii.
18. There is similarly a possible allusion to Marcellus’
teaching in xi. 9, which, however, may equally well be a reminiscence
of some cognate earlier heresy.

45 There is much more
evidence to this effect in Reuter, Augustinische Studien, p. 182
f. It was probably due to jealousy between West and East; cf. the
way in which John of Jerusalem ignored the African decision in
Pelagius’ case. But the West was ignorant, as well as
jealous, of the East. Even in his last years, after his sojourn
in Asia Minor, Hilary believed that Jerusalem was, as had been
prophesied, an uninhabited ruin; Tr. in Ps. cxxiv. § 2,
cxxxi. §§ 18, 23, cxlvi. § 1.

48 This sparing of
Marcellus, in the case of a Western like Hilary, may have been a
concession to the incapacity of the West, e.g. Julius of Rome and the
Council of Sardica, to see his error. But this is not so likely
as that it was a falling in with the general policy of Athanasius, as
was the rare mention of the homoousion; cf. Gwatkin, op.
cit. 42 n. Hilary was singularly independent of Western
opinion, and his whole aim was to win the East.

49 No such
examination seems to have been made as that to which Reuter in his
admirable Augustinische Studien has subjected some of the
thoughts of St. Augustine.

54Ib., p.
159. It would not be fair to judge Hilary by the de
Synodis alone. The would-be diplomatist, in his eagerness to
bring about a reconciliation, is not quite just either to the facts or
to his own feelings.

61 Sulpicius Severus,
Chron. ii. 45, says that he addressed at this time three
petitions to the Emperor. This is, of course, not impossible; but
it is more likely that he had in his mind the two appeals, that before
the exile and the present one, and the Invective.

64 It is true that the
Nicene Council is not named here, but the allusion is obvious.
The Conservatives had actually objected to the novelty of the Creed;
and the Arians had, as Hilary goes on to say, used the pretext of
novelty to destroy the Gospel. The Council of Nicæa was
thirty-five years before, and is very accurately described as a
‘Synod of our fathers.’

66 ‘Bodies lifted up
without support, women hanging by the feet without their garments
falling about their face.’ The other references which the
Benedictine editor gives for this curious statement are evidently
borrowed from this of Hilary. From the time of the first
Apologists exorcism is, of course, constantly appealed to as an
evidence of the truth of Christianity, but usually, in somewhat
perfunctory language, and without the assertion that the writer has
himself seen what he records. Hilary himself does not profess to
be an eye-witness.

67 This is a telling
point. Constantius had been notoriously unsuccessful in his
Persian Wars.

68 The text is
corrupt, but it is not probable that Hilary means that Paulinus was
first relegated to Phrygia and then to some pagan frontier district, if
such there was. It is quite in Hilary’s present vein to
assume that because the Montanists were usually called after the
province of their origin, in which they were still numerous, therefore
all Phrygians were heretics and outside the pale of Christendom.
If hordeo be read for horreo the passage is
improved. Paulinus had either to be satisfied with rations of
barley bread, the food of slaves, or else to beg from the
heretics. Such treatment is very improbable, when we remember
Hilary’s own comfort in exile. But passions were excited,
and men believed the worst of their opponents. We may compare the
falsehoods in Walker’s Sufferings of the Clergy, and in
Neal’s Puritans, which were eagerly believed in and after
our own Civil War.

69 Hilary had previously
(§ 27) asserted that ‘the Apostle has taught us to
communicate with the tombs of the saints.’ This is an
allusion to Rom. xii. 13, with the strange reading ‘tombs’
for ‘necessities’ (μνείαις for
χρείαις), which
has, in fact, considerable authority in the mss. of the New Testament and in the Latin Christian
writers. How far this reading may have been the cause, how far
the effect, of the custom of celebrating the Eucharist at the tombs of
Martyrs, it is impossible to say. The custom was by this time
more than a century old, and one of its purposes was to maintain the
sense of unity with the saints of the past. Constantius, by
denying their doctrine, had made himself their enemy.

93 Cf. Ad
Const. ii. 8, in writing which his own words in the De
Trinitate must have come into his mind. He had probably
borrowed the thought from Origen, contra Celsum, i. 62.
Similar apostrophes are in v. 19, vi. 19 f., 33.

104 Jerome, Apol.
adv. Rufinum, i. 2, says that the total length of the Commentaries
on Job and the Psalms was about 40,000 lines, i.e. Virgilian
hexameters. The latter, at a tough estimate, must be nearly
35,000 lines in its present state. But Jerome, as we shall see,
was not acquainted with so many Homilies as have come down to us; we
must deduct about 5,000 lines, and this will leave l0,000 for the
Commentary on Job, making it two sevenths of the length of the
other. Jerome, however, is not careful in his statements of
lengths; he calls the short De Synodis ‘a very long
book,’ Ep. v. 2.

105Tractatusought to be translated thus. It is the
term, and the only term, used so early as this for the bishop’s
address to the congregation; in fact, one might almost say that
tractare, tractatus in Christian language had no other
meaning. It is an anachronism in the fourth century to render
prædicare by ‘preach;’ cf. Duchesne, Liber
Pontificalis, i. 126.

106 E.g.
fundamen, Tr. in Ps. cxxviii. 10, germen, cxxxiv.
1, revolubilis, ii. 23, peccamen, ii. 9 fin. and
often. The shape of sentences, though simple, is always good; to
take one test word, sæpe, which was almost if not quite
extinct in common use, occurs fairly often near the end of a period,
where it was needed for rhythm, which frequenter would have
spoiled. Some Psalms, e.g. xiii., xiv., are treated more
rhetorically than others.

107Psalm li. is the only
exception, due, no doubt, to careless transcription. The Homilies
on the titles of Psalms ix. and xci. do not count; they are probably
spurious, and in any case are incomplete, as the text of the Psalms is
not discussed.

108 So Zingerle, Preface,
p. xiv, to whom we owe the excellent Vienna Edition of the Homilies,
the only part of Hilary’s writing which has as yet appeared in a
critical text. The writer of the former of these two Homilies, in
§ 2, says that the title of a Psalm always corresponds to the
contents. This is quite contrary to Hilary’s teaching, who
frequently points out and ingeniously explains what seem to him, to be
discrepancies.

109 E.g. in the
Instruction or discourse preparatory to the Homilies, and in the
introductory sections of that on Ps. 118 (119).

110 E.g. Instr. in
Ps., § 12, the fifty days of rejoicing during which Christians
must not prostrate themselves in prayer, nor fast.

112 The account of
exorcism given on Ps. 64, § 10, suggests Cyprian, Ad. Don.
5, but the subject is such a commonplace that nothing definite can be
said.

113 He is here cited
by the volume and page of the edition by Lommatzsch. His system
of interpretation is admirably described in the fourth of Dr.
Bigg’s Bampton Lectures, The Christian Platonists of
Alexandria.

131 It must be
confessed that some authorities refuse to regard this work as the De
Mysteriis of Hilary. Among these is Ebert, Litteratur des
Mittelalters, p. 142, who admits that the matter might be
Hilary’s, but denies that the manner and style are
his.

132Comm. in Ep. ad
Gal. ii. pref.: Hilarius in hymnorum
carmine Gallos indociles vocat. This may mean that Hilary
actually used the words ‘stubborn Gauls’ in one of his
hymns. There would be nothing extraordinary in this; the early
efforts, and especially those of the Arians which Hilary imitated for a
better purpose, often departed widely from the propriety of later
compositions, as we shall see in one of those attributed to Hilary
himself.

133 It is true
that the Fourth Council of Toledo (a.d. 633)
in its 13th canon couples Hilary with Ambrose as the writer of hymns in
actual use. But these canons are verbose productions, and this
may be a mere literary flourish, natural enough in countrymen and
contemporaries of Isidore of Seville, who knew, no doubt from
Jerome’s Viri Illustres, that Hilary was the first Latin
hymn writer.

134 Two of the simplest
stanzas are as follows:— Extra quam caper potest mens humana manet Filius in Patre, rursus quem penes sit Pater dignus, qui genitus est Filius in Deum. Felix quid potuit fide res tantas penitus credulus assequi, ut incorporeo ex Deo profectus fuerit primogenitus Dei. It is written in stanzas of six
lines in the ms.; the metre is the second
Asclepiad. Gamurrini, the discoverer, and Fechtrup (in
Wetzer-Welte’s Encyclopædia) regard it as the work of
Hilary, but the weight of opinion is against them.

136 Printed in full
by Mai, Patrum Nova Bibliotheca, p. 490. He suspends
judgment, and will not say that it is unworthy of Hilary. The
Benedictine editor, Coustant, gives a few stanzas as specimens, and
summarily rejects it.

137 The four quarters of
the universe are ortus, occasus, aquilo, septentrio; one
of these last must mean the south. This would point to some
German land as the home of the author; in no country of Romance tongue
could such an error have been perpetrated. Perire is used
for perdere, but this is not unparalleled.

138 In
Mai’s Patrum Nova Bibliotheca, vol. i., is a short
treatise on the Genealogies of Christ. The method of
interpretation is the same as Hilary’s, but the language is not
his; and the terms used of the Virgin in §§ 11, 12, are not
as early as the fourth century. In the same volume is an
exposition of the beginning of St. John’s Gospel in an anti-Arian
sense. In spite of some difference of vocabulary, there is no
strong reason why this should not be by Hilary; cf. especially,
§§ 5–7. Mai also prints in the same volume a
short fragment on the Paralytic (St. Matt. ix. 2), too brief for a
judgment to be formed. In Pitra’s Spicilegium
Solesmense, vol. i., is a brief discussion on the first chapters of
Genesis, dealing chiefly with the Fall. It appears, like the
Homilies on the Psalms, to be the report of some extemporary addresses,
and is more likely than any of the preceding to be the work of
Hilary. It is quite in his style, but the contents are
unimportant. But we must remember that the scribes were rarely
content to confess that they were ignorant of the name of an author
whom they transcribed; and that, being as ill-furnished with scruples
as with imagination, they assigned everything that came to hand to a
few familiar names. Two further works ascribed to Hilary are
obviously not his. Pitra, in the volume already cited, has
printed considerable remains of a Commentary on the Pauline Epistles,
which really belongs to Theodore of Mopsuestia; and a Commentary on the
seven Canonical Epistles, recently published in the Spicilegium
Casinense, vol. iii., is there attributed, with much reason, to his
namesake of Arles.

143 There are fifteen in
the collection, but the second and third which are as long as the rest
together, and are obviously extracts from the same work, are not by
Hilary. He expressly says (Fragm. i. § 6) that he will
commence with the council of Arles and the exile of Paulinus.
These documents narrate at great length events which began six years
earlier, and with which Hilary and his province had no direct
concern. This proves that the fragments are not a portion of the
Liber adversus Ursacium et Valentem. Internal evidence
proves not less clearly that they cannot be excerpts from some other
work of Hilary. In Fragm. ii. § 21 we are told that
apparently in the year 349, Athanasius excommunicated Marcellus of
Ancyra. It is of course, notorious that he never did so; the
mistake is one which Hilary could not possibly have made. None
the less, these fragments are both in themselves and in the documents
which they embody, one of our most important authorities for the
transactions they narrate, and are indisputably contemporary and
authentic. Nor is there any reasonable doubt as to the
genuineness of the thirteen. Those of them which reveal the
inconstancy of Liberius have been assailed by some Roman Catholic
writers, though they are accepted by others. The same suspicion
has extended to others among the fragments, because they are found in
company with these revelations concerning Liberius. But the
doubts have been suggested by the wish to disbelieve.

144 This correspondence
which Hilary has preserved (Fragm. xiii.–xv.) is interesting as
shewing how difficult it must have been for the laity to determine who
was, and who was not, a heretic, when all parties used the same
Scriptural terms in commendation of themselves and condemnation of
their opponents. It begins with a public letter in which
Germinius makes a declaration of faith in Homoeousion terms, without
any mention of the reasons which had induced him to depart from the
Homoean position. This is followed by a reproachful letter, also
intended for publicity, from Valens, Ursacius, and others. They
had refused to attend to the rumour of his defection; but now are
compelled, by his own published letter, to ask the plain question,
whether or not he adheres to ‘the Catholic Faith set forth and
confirmed by the Holy Council at Rimini.’ If he had added
to the Homoean formula, which was that the Son is ‘like the
Father,’ the words ‘in substance’ or ‘in all
things,’ he had fallen into the justly condemned heresy of Basil
of Ancyra. They demand an explicit statement that he never had
said, and never would say, anything of the kind; and warn him that he
is gravely suspected, complaints of his teaching having been made by
certain of his clergy to neighbouring bishops, which they trust will be
proved groundless. Germinius made no direct reply to this letter,
but addressed a manifesto to a number of more sympathetic bishops,
containing the scriptural proofs of the divinity of Christ and
recalling the fact that the Homoean leaders, before their own victory,
had acquiesced in the Homoeousian confession. Any teaching to the
contrary is the work, not of God, but of the spirit of this world, and
he entreats those whom he addresses to circulate his letter as widely
as possible, lest any should fall through ignorance into the snares of
the devil. Germinius was assured of safety in writing thus.
Valentinian’s support of Auxentius had proved that bishops might
hold what opinions they would on the great question provided they were
not avowed Arians. Germinius had been a leader of the Homoean
party, and it is at least possible that his change of front was due to
his knowledge that the Emperor, though he would not eject Homoeans, had
no sympathy with them and would allow them no influence. In fact,
the smaller the share of conscience, the greater the historical
interest of Germinius’ action as shewing the decline of Homoean
influence in the West.